(The New Middle Ages) Adam J. Goldwyn (Auth.) - Byzantine Ecocriticism - Women, Nature, and Power in The Medieval Greek Romance (2018, Palgrave Macmillan) PDF

T H E N E W M I D D L E A G E S
Byzantine
Ecocriticism
WOMEN , NATURE , and
POWER in the MEDIEVAL
GREEK ROMANCE
Adam J. Goldwyn
The New Middle Ages
Series editor
Bonnie Wheeler
English & Medieval Studies
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas, USA
The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of
medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s his-
tory and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series
includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/series/14239
Adam J. Goldwyn
Byzantine Ecocriticism
Women, Nature, and Power in the
Medieval Greek Romance
Adam J. Goldwyn
North Dakota State University
Fargo, North Dakota, USA
The New Middle Ages

ISBN 978-3-319-69202-9 ISBN 978-3-319-69203-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6
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For my parents,
Michael and Sallie
Acknowledgments
As a project that began in earnest five years ago and that had been gestat-
ing for (at least) five years before that, Byzantine Ecocriticism only came to
fruition because of the time, generosity, and support of people and orga-
nizations too numerous to list; I will nevertheless try to do my best to
recall them here. My first thanks go to the City University of New York
(CUNY) students who passed through my classes between 2006 and
2009, first at Brooklyn College and then at the City College of New York.
Their insights and questions, with one of which I open this work, helped
me see, at an early stage in my career, the urgency and necessity of engaged
scholarship. Several other people from those years also deserve mention:
Phillip Mitsis and André Aciman are aspirational models of generous men-
torship; Karen Emmerich has always offered me good advice and great pep
talks; and I am very grateful for the friendship of my graduate school col-
league turned co-editor and co-author James Nikopoulos.
My colleagues at Uppsala University helped me find my footing in
Byzantine Studies during a post-doctoral fellowship from 2011 to 2013;
special thanks go to Eric Cullhed and Terése Nilsson, who comprised the
audience of the initial presentations in various states of disarray that I
delivered during those years and in several subsequent returns; I have ben-
efited greatly from the innumerable informal discussions and from the rich
intellectual environment they helped create there. While at Uppsala, I also
met Przemysław Marciniak, who welcomed me into the extended family
of Byzantinists associated with the University of Silesia: Katarzyna Warcaba,
Tomasz Labuk, Nikos Zagklas, and Baukje van den Berg.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A substantial financial investment in this work was provided by the

Swedish Institute at Athens (SIA), where I was a research fellow for the fall
of 2013. The Gustav Karlsson Memorial Lecture I delivered there towards
the end of my residency was the first public forum in which the ideas that
would later become Chap. 4 were presented. I wish to thank Gunnel
Ekroth for, among other things, encouraging me to apply, and Arto
Pentinnen, the director of the SIA, for his kindness while I was there.
Andronike Makres, whom I first met as an exchange student in Athens in
2002, deserves thanks in equal parts for her generous hospitality and for
her insights into various aspects of Classical and Byzantine Greek history,
literature, and culture, and for being an inimitable guide to the landscapes
and monuments of Greece. During that time, too, Vasiliki Dimoula
opened up new worlds of Modern Greek poetry to me, and I have very
happy memories of our reading and translating together.
I first arrived at Dumbarton Oaks in 2008 for the Medieval Greek
Summer School, where long study sessions with Katherine Lu-Hsu and
others were indispensable to my survival. Alice-Mary Talbot, who taught
me there, can also add me to the long list of Byzantinists who owe her a
deep debt of gratitude for her guidance and mentorship over the years. I
was welcomed back to Dumbarton Oaks as a fellow for the academic
year 2016/17 in order to complete this project. Special thanks to Elena
Boeck for her warmhearted skepticism, all the fellows in and out of
Byzantine Studies for providing a wonderfully stimulating intellectual
and collegial environment, and the hardworking library and other insti-
tutional staff.
I also wish to thank my colleagues in the English Department at North
Dakota State University (NDSU) for making me feel at home in Fargo
and for generously shouldering the extra work that the absences I required
to complete this book have entailed. I tested many of the readings con-
tained in the volume on my students in the various courses in medieval
literature and literature and the environment I taught at NDSU, and I
thank the students for working through these texts and ideas with me, for
keeping literature fresh and fun, and for helping me achieve a level of cre-
ativity and insight I could never have achieved on my own. An indepen-
dent study with Emilee Ruhland was particularly enjoyable, and I would
be remiss in not wishing her the best in her future pursuits.
Perhaps no one has suffered more at the hands of my Greek than
Dimitra Kokkini; I owe her an apology more than a thanks. For well over
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ix
a decade, she has painstakingly revised thousands of lines of translation

with me, stoically enduring every indignity I could heap upon her native
language at all stages of its historical development. Her attempts to teach
me even the rudiments of Greek grammar and syntax have been equal
parts heroic and futile, but I have enjoyed it nevertheless,
#readingknowledge.
Ingela Nilsson has helped me to such an extent and in such diverse
ways—in supervising my post-doc, securing funding and helping with
grants, discussing ideas, reading drafts, co-authoring papers, co-editing
volumes, co-organizing conferences, and in being a mentor and friend—
that it has become increasingly difficult to express my gratitude to her in
different ways in each publication. I was lucky to stumble into her orbit,
and it is a simple truth that my career, much less this book, would not have
been possible without all the doors she has opened for me and, as impor-
tantly, all her advice and careful reading of my work over the years.
This book would not have been possible without the help of Bonnie
Wheeler, the editor of the New Middle Ages series; Allie Bochicchio, the
literature editor; and Emily Janakiram, the editorial assistant, who accepted
the proposal, encouraged my writing, and helped manage the process of
bringing it into print.
Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Anastassiya Andrianova, who
has not only immeasurably enriched my life outside of the academy, but
has also been both my chief cheerleader and my most trusted critic. Her
compassion for animals and care for the environment, in life and in schol-
arship, has been an endless source of admiration and wonder for me, and
her example sets the standard for what it means to make kin with the
myriad beings with whom we share the only life-generating and life-
sustaining planet we have yet discovered in this vast universe.
Portions of Chaps. 1 and 2 appeared in a different form as “A Case-
Study in Byzantine Ecocriticism: Zoomorphic and Anthomorphic
Metaphors in the Medieval Greek Romance,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment 23.2 (2016), 220–239, published
here by permission of Oxford University Press. Portions of Chaps. 1 and
4 appeared as “Towards a Byzantine Ecocriticism: Witches and Nature
Control in the Medieval Greek Romance,” Byzantine and Modern Greek
Studies 39.1(2015), 66–84. © Cambridge University Press, reproduced
with permission.
Abbreviations of Medieval Greek Romances
Byz.Ach. The Tale of Achilles = The Byzantine Achilleid, edited by Ole

Smith. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1999.
DA Digenis Akritis, edited and translated by Elizabeth Jeffreys.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
D&C Eugenianos, Niketas. Drosilla and Charikles, in Conca,
Fabrizio. Il Romanzo Bizantino del XII Secolo. Turin: Unione
Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1994, 305–498. English trans-
lation from Jeffreys, Elizabeth. Four Byzantine Novels.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012, 339–458.
H&H Makrembolites, Eumathios/Eustathios. Hysmine and Hysminias,
in Conca, Fabrizio. Il Romanzo Bizantino del XII Secolo. Turin:
Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1994, 499–688. English
translation from Jeffreys, Elizabeth. Four Byzantine Novels.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012, 157–270.
K&C Kallimachos and Chrysorroi. Pichard, Michel. Le Roman de
Callimaque et de Chrysorrhoé. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956.
English translation in Betts, Gavin. Three Medieval Greek
Romances. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995, 33–90.
KT The Knight’s Tale. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1986. The Riverside
Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 37–65.
Modern English translation from Wright, David and
Christopher Cannon. The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011, 23–78.
xi
xii ABBREVIATIONS OF MEDIEVAL GREEK ROMANCES
L&R Livistros and Rodamni. Lambert, J.A. Le Roman de Libistros et

Rhodamné. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitg.-Mij, 1935.
English translation in Betts, Gavin. Three Medieval Greek
Romances. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995, 91–185.
MT The Miller’s Tale. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1986. The Riverside
Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 66–76.
Modern English translation from Wright, David and
Christopher Cannon. The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011, 79–97.
R&D Prodromos, Theodore. Rhodanthe and Dosikles, in Conca,
Fabrizio. Il Romanzo Bizantino del XII Secolo. Turin: Unione
Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1994, 63–303. English transla-
tion from Jeffreys, Elizabeth. Four Byzantine Novels. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2012, 1–156.
V&C Velthandros and Chrysandza. Kriaras, Emanuel. Βυζαντινὰ
ἱπποτικὰ μυθιστορήματα. Athens: Βασικὴ Βιβλιοθήκη, 1955,
85–130. English translation in Betts, Gavin. Three Medieval
Greek Romances. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995, 1–32.
WoT The War of Troy. Edited by Papathomopoulos, Manolis and
Jeffreys, Elizabeth. Athens: National Bank of Greece Cultural
Foundation, 1996.
“Ἐγὼ δὲ οὐδ’ ἄλλως ποτὲ τὴν θηροφρονίαν τεθαύμακα. πρῶτον μὲν γὰρ
τυραννίδι τὸ πρᾶγμα ἔοικε καὶ ψυχῆς ἐστι ζῴου ἀφαίρεσις καὶ πόλεμος
ἄντικρυς καὶ φύσεων ἡμέρων ἀκήρυκτος ὄλεθρος”
“I myself have never admired hunting at all, principally because the act
seems a kind of tyranny: it is the removal of the soul of a living being, open
warfare, the unconsidered killing of gentle natures.”
—Michael Psellos, Letter to Sagmatas1
1
Michael Psellos, Scripta Minora, edited by Edward Kurtz (Milan: Società Editrice “Vita
e Penserio,” 1941), 292.
Contents
1 Byzantine Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis 1
2 Zoomorphic and Anthomorphic Metaphors in the

“Proto-Romance” Digenis Akritis 39
3 Rape, Consent, and Ecofeminist Narratology

in the Komnenian Novels 85
4 Witches and Nature Control in the Palaiologan Romances

and Beyond 147
5 Byzantine Posthumanism: Autopoiesis, Sympoiesis,

and Making Kin in the Gardens of Romance 191
Index 235
xv
CHAPTER 1
Byzantine Studies in an Age

of Environmental Crisis
Reading in the Anthropocene
In 2007, I was teaching a course called Introduction to Classical Cultures
at Brooklyn College in which we were reading Book 18 of the Iliad, the
description of Achilles’ shield. As readers of the Iliad may remember, the
surface of the shield is emblazoned with a representation of the cosmos in
miniature:
ἐν μὲν γαῖαν ἔτευξ᾽, ἐν δ᾽ οὐρανόν, ἐν δὲ θάλασσαν,

ἠέλιόν τ᾽ ἀκάμαντα σελήνην τε πλήθουσαν,
ἐν δὲ τὰ τείρεα πάντα, τά τ᾽ οὐρανὸς ἐστεφάνωται,
Πληϊάδας θ᾽ Ὑάδας τε τό τε σθένος Ὠρίωνος
Ἄρκτόν θ᾽, ἣν καὶ Ἄμαξαν ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν,
ἥ τ᾽ αὐτοῦ στρέφεται καί τ᾽ Ὠρίωνα δοκεύει,
οἴη δ᾽ ἄμμορός ἐστι λοετρῶν Ὠκεανοῖο.
[Hephaistos] made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water, and
the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness, and on it all the
constellations that festoon the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades and the
strength of Orion and the Bear, whom men give also the name of the
Wagon, who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion and she alone is
never plunged in the wash of the Ocean.1
Il.18.483–489. All citations in Greek from Homer, Homeri Opera and in English from
1
Homer, Iliad.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A.J. Goldwyn, Byzantine Ecocriticism, The New Middle Ages,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6_1
2 A.J. GOLDWYN
As we read this passage, one of the students asked me if the ancient Greeks
had a better imagination than we do: when he looks into the night sky, he
sees nothing, or occasionally a few stars, for instance, the three that con-
stitute Orion’s belt. He wanted to know whether the ancient Greeks saw
the people, gods, and monsters that populated their night sky more fully
in the stars, or whether they had a deeper imagination and could fill in the
blanks themselves. This was fundamentally a phenomenological question
about how people’s experience of nature in the ancient world differed
from that in the modern era, a question that led us to a discussion of the
environmental circumstances that contribute to this meaning making pro-
cess of gazing at the night sky and, through this, to what we see when we
look at the environment compared with what our pre-modern ancestors
saw.
I didn’t have a very good answer about the starry imagination of the
Greeks at the time, but the question lingered, troubling me even after
the semester ended. But that summer I stumbled across an article in The
New Yorker entitled “The Dark Side: Making War on Light Pollution”
by David Owen.2 In it, Owen writes about how Galileo was able to stand
in the center of Padua, a major city in the seventeenth century, and make,
with his handmade telescopes, startling astronomical discoveries, includ-
ing the momentous one that the Milky Way was made up of individual
stars. This moment is often conceived as a landmark in human scientific
progress, and we wonder at the new discovery Galileo made with such
limited technology; I, however, was concerned not with the new discov-
ery, but with the previous belief it displaced: before 1610, no one knew
the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. The night sky was so
dark, so full of stars, and the Milky Way, which today is virtually invisible
and which certainly none of my students could see from their homes in
New York, was so bright that it seemed solid. Indeed, by way of compari-
son, Owen notes that “[t]oday, a person standing on the observation
deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable
to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a hand-
ful of very bright stars—less than one per cent of what Galileo would
2
Owen, “The Dark Side.” For light pollution, most frequently associated with “sky glow,”
that is, the ambient electric light that brightens the night sky, see Narisada and Schreuder,
Light Pollution Handbook, who define the term on pages 61–78.
BYZANTINE STUDIES IN AN AGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS 3
have been able to see without a telescope.”3 It was no wonder that the
student in my class had asked about the difference in night skies: he was
seeing something vastly different than had the ancient singers and their
audiences.
This light pollution, Owen writes, “deprives many of us of a direct rela-
tionship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has
been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old
jaw-dropping wonder.”4 The invention and ubiquity of electric lights
marked a paradigm shift in the way in which humans perceive nature: as
Paul Bogard notes, “Until well into the twentieth century, what passed for
outdoor lighting was simply one form or another of fire—torches, candles,
or dim, stinking, unreliable lamps.”5 That is, the sky by day or night had
appeared the same and followed the same cycles of brightness and dark-
ness for the entirety of human history, up until several decades ago.
This was my first encounter with the pedagogical consequences of the
Anthropocene, a term that gained widespread acceptance after the Nobel
Laureate and atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen popularized the term.6
The Anthropocene is, in the words of Jedediah Purdy, “a slogan for the
climate change era,” one that proposes the demarcation of a new period
in geological history since, according to Purdy, “we have entered a new
era of the earth’s history, when humans are a force, maybe the force,
shaping the planet.”7 The concept of the Anthropocene, however, has
less to do with the division of stratigraphy and geologic time than with
contemporary politics and policies and the ideologies that undergird
them; in her Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, Joanna Zylinska notes
that “my own use of the term ‘Anthropocene’ in this book is first and
foremost as an ethical pointer rather than as a scientific descriptor. In
other words, the Anthropocene serves here as a designation of the
human obligation towards the geo- and biospheres, but also towards
3
Owen, “The Dark Side,” 28.
4
Owen, “The Dark Side,” 28–29.
5
Bogard, End of Night, 10.
6
For a history of the term and the various ways in which it has been used, see Purdy, After
Nature, 6 and Dawson, Extinction, 19.
7
Purdy, After Nature, 9, 7. See, further, Zylinska, who writes: “This unique situation, or
rather geo-historical period, in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to
life on earth, has recently gained the moniker ‘Anthropocene,’” Minimal Ethics, 10.
4 A.J. GOLDWYN
thinking about the geo- and biosphere as concepts.”8 Thus to accept the
Anthropocene as a category for measuring time is to acknowledge a set
of causal claims about (often destructive) human engagement with the
shaping of the materiality of the world, couched in historicized language
about the classification of geo-historical time. More importantly, how-
ever, it requires that we accept the necessity of a new ethical relationship
with that materiality and a new set of behavioral practices for ameliorat-
ing the harm already done and, hopefully, the cultivation of an ethics and
praxis of sustainability and reparability. The Anthropocene thus requires,
according to Purdy, an awareness of the ways in which faulty human
thought processes and environmental ideologies lead to destructive
behavior: “The Anthropocene finds its most radical expression in our
acknowledgment that the familiar divide between people and the natural
world is no longer useful or accurate. Because we shape everything, from
the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that
stands apart from human beings.”9 For Purdy, the Anthropocene is
marked by the blurring, breaking down, or complete dissolution of the
boundaries between society and nature, between nature and culture,
between humans and nature. Indeed, this is what I saw in the classroom
with this student’s question: a lack of awareness about the entangled
ways in which humans and nature veer towards one another, rendering
any strict dichotomy meaningless.
In the years since, the pedagogical consequences inherent in accepting
the Anthropocene as a categorical framework for thinking about the con-
temporary historical moment have led me to the inescapable conclusion
that environmental, technological, economic, and political considerations
of this period—exemplified by those that have led to the proliferation of
lights and, thus, light pollution; about urban density, sprawl, and car
culture;10 about population control, crime, and public safety;11 and about
increased economic activity through extended commercial hours12—have
effectively created certain environmental ideologies and lived experiences
among Anthropocene readers that have shaped our worldview before we
8
Zylinska, Minimal Ethics, 19.
9
Purdy, After Nature, 9.
10
Narisada and Schreuder, Light Pollution, 44–50.
11
Narisada and Schreuder, Light Pollution, 45.
12
Narisada and Schreuder, Light Pollution, 52–54.
even open a book, and that this has influenced our interpretation and liter-
ary analysis of texts composed 2500 years ago. Global warming, climate
change, light and noise pollution, deforestation, urbanization, agribusi-
ness and industrial farming, species extinction, and the other environmen-
tal consequences of the Anthropocene have already entered the classroom
whether we like it or not, whether we are ready to engage with it or not,
and they are already warping our perception of ancient texts: we can no
longer see the starry night, literally or as depicted in pre-modern litera-
ture, as previous generations of scholars did, much less as the original
authors and audiences of pre-modern texts did.
This new environmental context requires a new language, a new set of
concerns, for thinking about scholarship in general (anthropogenic climate
change and its various causes, manifestations, and possible solutions have
become virtually all-consuming in atmospheric sciences, oceanography,
and related hard sciences) and in thinking about literary criticism and
humanities scholarship in the Anthropocene, and the issue of light pollu-
tion has become something of a metaphor for the way I read the past: we
are operating not only at a temporal remove from pre-Anthropocenic litera-
ture, but also at an ideological, aesthetic, and phenomenological remove. To
this list, too, one could add the emotional experience of the Anthropocene,13
as the environments we know and cherish die,14 as the glaciers we visited as
children melt, as the forests we love are killed by disease or fire or are cut
down and replaced with urban sprawl, as the stars we used to see are
obscured by increased light. At the same time, we revel in the thrills the
Anthropocene offers to some of us:15 expanded opportunities to visit
13
Timothy Morton has suggested that ecological thought “isn’t just about global warm-
ing, recycling, and solar power. […] It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion. It
has to do with depression and psychosis. […] It has to do with amazement, open-minded-
ness, and wonder” (Morton, Ecological Thought, 3).
14
See, for instance, the semi-satirical obituary for the Great Barrier Reef of Australia,
“which passed away after a long illness. It was 25 million years old” (Jacobson, “Obituary:
Great Barrier Reef”).
15
Mindful of the ways in which the positive and negative consequences of the Anthropocene
accrue unequally to different peoples based on geography, class, gender, and even species, as
elaborated by Dipesh Chakrabarty: “Why should one include the poor of the world—whose
carbon footprint is small anyway—by use of such all-inclusive terms as species or mankind
when the blame for the current crisis should be squarely laid at the door of the rich nations
in the first place and of the richer classes in the poorer ones?” (Chakrabary, “The Climate of
History,” 216).
6 A.J. GOLDWYN
faraway places and see new biomes, the de-extinction (that is, reviving spe-
cies previously made extinct) of plants and animals through genetic modi-
fication.16 It was this distance between environments past and present that
concerned me as a professor and scholar of the past: pre-Anthropocene
audiences must have looked at the night sky with real jaw-dropping won-
der, something that we, with much brighter skies, cannot really fathom.
Perhaps, I thought, Owen’s insight might be more widely applicable.
As light pollution has obscured the stars, so too have automobiles, air-
planes, and the interstate freeway system (not to mention GPS and
Google maps) obscured our view of medieval travel, modern germ the-
ory has obscured our view of the medieval experience of illness, and so
on (of course, such a broad sketch overlooks the variations in attitudes
and experiences among medieval and modern peoples and the gradual
changes in technology over time, even during the Middle Ages). While I
could not take my students from the heart of Brooklyn out into nature,
I could nevertheless do a better job of bringing nature into the class-
room, to make them aware of the way their own engagements with and
ideologies about the environment were reflected in their interpretations
of the texts we read, and the way that contemporary environmental poli-
tics shaped these interpretive positions. That is, I could help them
develop what Lawrence Buell calls an “environmental imagination.”17
Buell argues that the “environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagi-
nation the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of
imaging nature and humanity’s relation to it.”18 The environmental
imagination can reconnect us as readers with nature by emphasizing its
See, for instance, O’Connor, Resurrection Science.

16
Buell, Environmental Imagination.

17
18
Buell, Environmental Imagiation, 2. This idea is elsewhere echoed in writing about the
Anthropocene; Timothy Morton has argued that “modern economic structures have drasti-
cally affected the environment. Yet they have had an equally damaging effect on thinking
itself” (Morton, Ecological Thought, 5). Citing this line, Joanna Zylinska argues that “the
Anthropocene can therefore perhaps be seen as articulating, alongside the ecological disas-
ters, this crisis of critical thinking” (Minimal Ethics, 19). The idea is also a cornerstone of the
emergent discipline of critical plant studies; Randy Laist terms this increased remove from
plant-based knowledge “the defoliation of the cultural imagination” (Laist, Plants and
Literature, 10), though he argues that contemporary poetry might be a different case, inso-
far as it “has a deep symbolic interrelationship with flowering plants” (Laist, Plants and
Literature, 11).
position as subject rather than background in literary texts,19 and just as

importantly, “to rethink our assumptions about the nature of representa-
tion, reference, metaphor, characterization, personae, and canonicity.”20
That is to say, reading in the Anthropocene requires a fundamental revi-
sion of literary criticism (and cultural studies writ large) and of reading
defined by a new framework, a new ethics, and a new critical vocabu-
lary.21 Nor are these idle concerns; for Buell, developing this new thought
process is fundamental to participating in the contemporary political and
cultural life of the nation and the world and in securing the viability of
continued survival on a warming planet: “Although the creative and
critical arts may seem remote from the arenas of scientific investigation
and public policy, clearly they are exercising, however unconsciously, an
influence upon the emerging culture of environmental concern, just as
they have played a part in shaping as well as merely expressing every
other aspect of human culture.”22 The question, then, becomes what
these new value systems should contain, and how to model this new kind
of thinking.
Ecocriticisms and Intersectionalities Present

and Past
These questions led me to the academic discourse of ecocriticism, which

Cheryll Glotfelty defines as “the study of the relationship between litera-
ture and the physical environment,” with literature originally conceived of
19
Buell’s subsequent definition of “an environmental text” also functions as modeling the
concerns for environmental reading as critical practice, for which, see Buell, Environmental
Imagination, 6–8.
20
Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2.
21
Huggan and Tiffin expand on this definition to focus on questions of agency and subjec-
tivity: “The environmental imagination engages a set of aesthetic preferences for ecocriticism
which is not necessarily restricted to environmental realism or nature writing, but is especially
attentive to those forms of fictional and non-fictional writing that highlight nature and natu-
ral elements (landscape, flora and fauna, etc.) as self-standing agents, rather than support
structures for human action” (Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 13). The term is crucial
for Purdy as well, who offers a general defense of the term (Purdy, After Nature, 15–17) with
particular focus on “the link between ways of seeing, encountering, and valuing the world—
that is, imagination—and ways of acting, personally, politically, and legally, that have shaped
the world in concrete ways” (Purdy, After Nature, 15).
22
Buell, Environmental Imagination, 3.
8 A.J. GOLDWYN
as narrative texts, but in recent years having come to include a much

broader scope of cultural production.23 Though ecocriticism24 has by now
become sufficiently entrenched in academic circles that it requires neither
23
Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, xviii. For a general history of the devel-
opment of the field, see Buell, “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends.” For a broadening of
Glotfelty’s definition to include not only literature but also other forms of cultural produc-
tion and other academic discourses, see Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, for
whom, though Glotfelty’s definition “remains influential, the primary role of literary analysis
in ecocriticism is increasingly disputed; and, as Glotfelty herself admits, its mandate is now
usually accepted as extending to the fields of environmental philosophy and bioethics”
(Glotfelty, “Introduction,” 12). In their anthology of the best essays from ISLE, the disci-
pline’s flagship publication, the journal’s editors Scott Slovic and Michel Branch take with
them Glotfelty’s fundamental point about reading with the primacy of the environment, but
add to it the connection to contemporary climate issues; for them, ecocriticism is “the
explicit treatment of human–nonhuman relationships in literature [and] also the reading of
any work of literature (in any genre) in an effort to understand its environmental implica-
tions” (Branch and Slovic, Isle Reader, xiv).
For a survey of how a variety of ecocritics in the field’s first decade defined the term, see
Estok, “Report Card.” What all of these definitions have in common, he suggests, is that
ecocriticism must operate with an ethics of environmental activism: “Ecocriticism has distin-
guished itself, debates notwithstanding, first by the ethical stand it takes, its commitment to
the natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic study,
and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections. Ecocriticism may be many other
things besides, but it is always at least these two” (Estok, “Report Card,” 220).
24
In her 1996 introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Glotfelty asserts that “the taxo-
nomic name of this green branch of literary study is still being negotiated” (Glotfelty,
“Introduction,” xix) and offers as possible synonyms “ecopoetics, environmental literary criti-
cism, and green cultural studies” (Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xx). Glotfelty further notes that
each of these names comes with its own advantages and problems, and that, in fact, “Many
critics write environmentally conscious criticism without needing or wanting a specific name
for it” (Glotfelthy, “Introduction,” xx). In his 2002 reappraisal of the discipline, Buell rejects
the term he himself had done so much to popularize; even as he acknowledges that “ecocriti-
cism’ may well be here to stay,” he suggests instead the term “environmental criticism”
(Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 11). His “reason for belaboring the terminologi-
cal issue is the implicit narrowness of the ‘eco,’ insofar as it connotes the ‘natural’ rather than
the ‘built’ environment” (Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 11). In the ten years
since the publication of The Future of Environmental Criticism, however, even as the interac-
tion between the built and natural environments that caused Buell to propose the new term
has become increasingly incorporated into ecocritical discourse, Buell’s preferred term for
emphasizing that theoretical distinction has neither slowed the increasing hegemony of
“ecocriticism” as the disciplinary marker nor gained traction as an independent term in its
own right, and it is both to avoid any such terminological confusion and to place my own
work within this larger intellectual movement that I have chosen to use “ecocriticism” in my
own title.
a general introduction nor a broad defense,25 some questions remain in

terms of both theory and practice regarding its applicability to medieval
studies in general and Byzantine studies in particular, both of which—
though the latter in particular—have only just begun to witness the pen-
etration of ecocritical concerns. These concerns can be roughly divided
into three questions: (1) What can ecocriticism tell us about Byzantine
environmental ideology as depicted in literature and other cultural pro-
duction? (2) How can ecocriticism help inculcate an “environmental
imagination”? (3) What is the role (if any) of Byzantine studies in preserv-
ing the environment, broadly conceived, through scholarly engagement,
academic activism, and issues advocacy?
As many ecocritics have noted, the roots of ecocriticism are to be found
in the environmental movement, as societies across the globe are forced to
grapple with the increasingly unavoidable issues of climate change, envi-
ronmental degradation, and what some are now referring to as the Sixth
Great Extinction because it is witness to a rate of species extinction not
seen since the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.26 Ecocriticism devel-
oped as a literary practice when scholars came to see that their own disci-
pline was slow to make the connection between literary analysis and the
events of the outside world. As Glotfelty notes in “Literary Studies in an
Age of Environmental Crisis,” her by now canonical introduction to one
of ecocriticism’s foundational texts (and the inspiration for the title of my
own introduction here):
If your knowledge of the outside world were limited to what you could infer
from the major publications of the literary profession, you would quickly
discern that race, class, and gender were the hot topics of the late twentieth
century, but you would never suspect that the earth’s life support systems
were under stress … in contrast, if you were to scan the newspaper headlines
of the same period, you would learn of oil spills, lead and asbestos poison-
ing, toxic waste contamination, extinction of species at an unprecedented
rate, battles over public land use, protests over nuclear waste dumps, a grow-
ing hole in the ozone layer […]27
25
For such histories, see, for instance, Egan, Green Shakespeare, 17–44 and especially Buell,
The Future of Environmental Criticism, 1–28. For an early account of ecocriticism outside
academic publishing, see Parini, “The Greening of the Humanities,” and for a brief account
of its relevance to medieval ecocriticism, see Rudd, Greenery, 4–11.
26
See, for instance, Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction
and Dawson Extinction.
27
Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xvi. For a similar response, see Egan, Green Shakespeare, 1.
10 A.J. GOLDWYN
As a discourse developing from and in response to this crisis, then, eco-

criticism has been conceived by its practitioners as a politically oriented
activist movement along the lines of feminist, postcolonial, or queer
theory. Like these previous post-structural discourses that have informed
it, ecocriticism is a form of academic activism, with ecocritical scholar-
ship, at the very least, a form of advocacy. Thus, in introducing ecocriti-
cism to a popular audience in 1995, Jay Parini suggested in the New
York Times that “Environmental studies marks a return to activism and
social responsibility; it also signals a dismissal of theory’s more solipsistic
tendencies. From a literary aspect, it marks a re-engagement with real-
ism, with the actual universe of rocks, trees and rivers that lies behind
the wilderness of signs.”28 For Glotfelty and many other ecocritics, what
separates ecocriticism from other forms of scholarship in literary disci-
plines is that, unlike them, it is more than a detached intellectual pursuit
with limited real-world relevance; rather, they see literary analysis as the
essential tool for political engagement. Even if one were possible with-
out the other, they seem to suggest, it would not be ecocriticism.29
Indeed, in his contribution to The Ecocriticism Reader, William Howarth
makes the connection between scholarship and certain ideological and
activist positions the cornerstone of disciplinary practice; an ecocritic,
he says, is “a person who judges the merits and faults of writings that
depict the effects of culture upon nature, with a view toward celebrating
nature, berating its despoilers, and reversing their harm through politi-
cal action.”30
Among the most vocal supporters of this activist and politically engaged
strand of ecocriticism are those scholars who work in intersectional sub-
fields such as postcolonial ecocriticism, queer ecocriticism, feminist eco-
criticism (or ecofeminism), and Marxist ecocriticism.31 The ecofeminist
scholar Greta Gaard identifies the ways in which ecocritics see their field as
28
Parini, “The Greening of the Humanities,” 52.
29
See also Newman, “Marxism and Ecocriticism,” for a summary of many of the important
mission statements of early ecocritics connecting the discipline’s academic and scholarly aims
with its political and activist ones. Newman discusses, for instance, William Rueckert’s 1978
“Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” which argues for, above all, “a
principle of relevance” in literary theory (2).
30
Howarth, “Some Principles,” 69.
31
For recent works that aim at the intersection of ecocriticism and other post-structuralist
theories, see Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture and Adams and Gruen,
Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections.
intersecting with the work of scholar-activists working within other theo-

retical paradigms:
ecofeminism’s basic premise is that the ideology which authorizes oppres-

sions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities,
and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature.
Ecofeminism calls for an end to all oppressions, arguing that no attempt to
liberate women (or any other oppressed group) will be successful without an
equal attempt to liberate nature.32
Gaard connects two important ideas within ecocritical discourse: first, that
ecocriticism and feminism deconstruct the ideologies of power that per-
petuate the marginalized objects of oppression, and second, that ecocriti-
cism and feminism have their own activist positions that seek, through
advocacy, to empower these marginalized others. Similarly, in their intro-
duction to Ecofeminism and Globalization, Heather Eaton and Lois Ann
Lorentzen define ecofeminism as “an intellectual and activist movement
that makes critical connections between the domination of nature and the
exploitation of women.”33 Such a definition explicitly links scholarly and
political practice: it is both “intellectual” and “activist.”
The dual aims of scholarship and activism-as-advocacy can also be
found in Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson’s Queer
Ecologies, in which they argue that “the task of a queer ecology is to
probe the intersections of sex and nature with an eye to developing a
sexual politics that more clearly includes considerations of the natural
world and its biosocial constitution, and an environmental politics that
demonstrates an understanding of the ways in which sexual relations
organize and influence both the material world of nature and our per-
ceptions, experiences, and constitutions of that world.”34 But issues of
32
Gaard, “Living Interconnections,” 1. Gaard elaborates on these ideas in “Toward a
Queer Ecofeminism.” For a history of ecofeminism as political action, see Adams and Gruen,
Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections, which begins with Edith Ward’s 1892 claim that “the
case of the animal is the case of the woman” (7) and continues through the 1990 March on
Washington (20). For a brief outline of an ecofeminist paradigm for reading medieval
romances, see Heller, “For the Love of Nature.” Scholars in the related discipline of animal
studies have similarly noted the intersectionality of their work with these concerns; for which,
see, for instance, Weil, Thinking Animals, xviii, and the addition of “speciesism” to the list
of oppressive patriarchal ideologies that already included sexism and racism.
33
Eaton and Lorentzen, “Introduction,” 1.
34
Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, “Introduction,” 5.
12 A.J. GOLDWYN
ecocriticism and sex and sexuality cannot be separated from the larger
ideological forces, and they note that “beginning an understanding of
environmental politics with issues of race, gender, and sexuality expands
the understanding of what ‘counts’ as an environmental issue; viewed as
a site of articulation between ecological and social concerns, the envi-
ronment, from a queer, feminist, and anti-racist perspective, comes to be
understood as ‘where we live, work, play and worship’ (2004, 1), a field
open to a variety of intersectional analyses between sexual and environ-
mental politics.”35
Graham Huggin and Helen Tiffin identify a similar set of concerns in
what they term “the crossover field of postcolonial ecocriticism, which
also involves an ‘aesthetics committed to politics’ (Cilano and DeLoughrey
2007: 84).”36 They are concerned first with the literary analysis (“aesthet-
ics”) of discourses of power within literary texts (“politics”), defining the
central concern of ecocriticism “as a particular way of reading, rather than
a specific corpus of literary and other cultural texts. This way of reading is
as much affective as analytical—not that the two terms are mutually exclu-
sive—and morally attuned to the continuing abuses of authority that oper-
ate in humanity’s name.”37 This authority of abuse manifests itself in a
variety of intersecting ecocritical concerns: “After all, postcolonialism’s
concerns with conquest, colonisation, racism and sexism, along with its
investments in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and the relations
between native and invader societies and cultures, are also the central con-
cerns of animal and environmental studies.”38 As with ecofeminists and
queer ecocritics, postcolonial ecocritics see the interlocking networks of
power that marginalize based on racial, gendered, sexual, speciesist, and
other categories. Further, in line with theorists in these other subdisci-
plines, they conceive of the field as an activist one, arguing “that postcolo-
nial ecocriticism—like several other modes of ecocriticism—performs an
advocacy function both in relation to the real world(s) it inhabits and to
35
Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, “Introduction,” 27. The citation is from Stein,
Rachel, ed. New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality and Activism. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
36
Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 12. The citation is from Cilano, Cara and Elizabeth
DeLoughrey. “Against Authenticity: Global Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism.”
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14, no. 1 (2007), 71–86.
37
Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 13.
38
the imaginary spaces it opens up for contemplation of how the real world
might be transformed.”39 This advocacy function is similar to that espoused
by Gaard and other scholars working with ecocriticism and intersectional-
ity: “Human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging
the historical conditions under which human societies have constructed
themselves in hierarchical relation to other societies, both human and
nonhuman, and without imagining new ways in which these societies,
understood as being ecologically connected, can be creatively
transformed.”40
Marxist ecocritics are similarly concerned with the intersection of these
forces, though they add the concerns of global capital, labor, the alloca-
tion of these resources, and, perhaps most importantly, the environmental
consequences of the value systems that inform these concerns. In
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism,
Jason W. Moore begins with the by-now familiar rhetoric of climate crisis
(“The news is not good on planet Earth”),41 before moving on to a mis-
sion statement: “The work of this book is to encourage a debate—that
moves beyond Green Arithmetic: the idea that our histories may be con-
sidered and narrated by adding up Humanity (or Society) and Nature, or
even Capitalism plus Nature.”42 In this telling, it is not humanity as such
that is the cause of impending climate disaster, a causality insinuated within
the term itself (man is, after all, the anthropos in Anthropocene), but
rather the economic systems man has developed—capitalism, here, is the
root cause—and thus the cause of the destruction is embedded in the term
capitalocene, the word that is used to challenge the notion of the
Anthropocene. But Moore does not limit his critique of the climate crisis
only to ideologies about the environment; rather, he turns to the broad
intersections of the problems of capitalism with other manifestations of
the exercise of patriarchal power:
No less than the binaries of Eurocentrism, racism, and sexism, Nature/

Society is directly implicated in the modern world’s colossal violence,
inequality, and oppression. […] For the abstraction Nature/Society histori-
39
Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 12. For their definition of what constitutes advo-
cacy in scholarship, see Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 13ff.
40
41
Moore, “Introduction,” 1.
42
Moore, “Introduction,” 2.
14 A.J. GOLDWYN
cally conforms to a seemingly endless series of human exclusions [that]

correspond to a long history of subordinating women, colonial populations,
and peoples of color.43
This identification of the problem then leads to a call for a cognitive shift
along the lines of Buell’s environmental imagination to solve the climate
problem first and foremost through changing the discursive strategies,
ideologies, and thought processes that perpetuate these oppressions: “This
matters for our analytics, and also for our politics. Efforts to transcend
capitalism in any egalitarian and broadly sustainable fashion will be sty-
mied so long as the radical political imagination is captive to capitalism’s
either/or organization of reality: Nature/Society.”44
While the essential connection to contemporary political activism is rela-
tively easy to make in studies on modern and post-industrial literature, which
comprise the primary focus of Glotfelty and Fromm, Gaard, Huggan and
Tiffin, Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, and other ecocritics, this argu-
ment for contemporary relevance is seemingly more difficult for medieval
and other pre-Anthropocene literatures written centuries ago in radically
different environmental as well as political, cultural, and literary contexts.
Perhaps because of this, ecocriticism seems to become less overtly polit-
ical the further it is removed from contemporary subject matter, despite
continued attempts to model the environmental activism that first moti-
vated ecocritical scholarship. Thus, authors of book-length ecocritical
approaches to Shakespeare can be found saying things such as “part of the
radical appeal of ecocriticism in its embryonic stages was its gestures
toward activist possibilities, like other ‘political’ theories before it—femi-
nism, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and versions of cultural
materialism”45 and “this book treats such concerns for animals as a part of
43
Moore, “Introduction,” 2. For an earlier similar Marxist ecocritical assertion of intersec-
tionality, see Newman, “Marxism and Ecocriticism”: “At a time when it is becoming clear
that environmental destruction is a feature of modern societies as pervasive and persistent as
racial and sexual oppression, ecocriticism has begun a crucial expansion of the vibrant tradi-
tion of radical scholarship” (3).
44
Newman, “Marxism and Ecocriticism,” 3.
45
Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 2. Similar assertions concerning Shakespearean
analysis are made in Strickler, “Sex and the City,” while Glotfelty also equates feminism and
post-colonialism with ecocriticism (Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xviii). Borlik, Ecocriticism and
Early Modern Green Literature also offers a model of ecocriticism without making explicit its
connection to contemporary political concerns, and yet his discussion of the fears of environ-
mental instability caused by, for instance, a population boom, deforestation, and air pollu-
tion, and the government’s attempts to ameliorate this environmental degradation through
increased regulation, can be implicitly read alongside a contemporary context.
a growing coalition that unites socialists and anarchists with environmen-

talists, anti-capitalists, their cousins the anti-globalizationists and animal
rights activists.”46 Though different from the activist mode of ecocritical
engagement with contemporary politics, this model of ecocriticism, con-
cerned exclusively with cultivating the environmental imagination rather
than working in conjunction with activism, is also well established within
ecocriticism. In Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate argues that changing
attitudes and value systems is the only proper role for ecocriticism (what
he calls “ecopoetics”), since there is no possible way for environmental
literary criticism to have a direct effect on policy:
It would be quixotic to suppose that a work of literary criticism might be an

appropriate place in which to spell out a practical programme for better
environmental management. That is why ecopoetics should begin not as a
set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as
a way of reflecting upon what it means to dwell with the earth. Ecopoetics
must concern itself with consciousness […] ecopoetics is phenomenological
before it is political, and for this reason ecopoetics may be regarded as
pre-political.47
In response to this line, the Shakespearean ecocritic Timothy Egan argues

that “Bate’s claim that ecocriticism should be necessarily non- (or in his
phrase pre-) political is as absurd as it would be in the fields of Marxist,
feminist, postcolonial and queer criticism.”48 This debate suggests a fault
line within ecocritical studies, with scholars making the case for two legiti-
mate if different models; ecocriticism has space for both.
Lisa Kiser’s “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature” demonstrates this
similar turn away from political engagement; instead, it aims to be useful
to ecocritics “who hope to comprehend how modern cultural assumptions
about the environment have developed from their originary Western
roots.”49 Rebecca Douglass’s “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature”
uses similar rhetoric. Douglass defines ecocriticism as “reading with atten-
tion to treatments of nature, land, and place, informed by a desire to
understand past and present connections between literature and human
activities regarding the earth,”50 thus omitting the double framing of
46
Egan, Green Shakespeare, 3.
47
Bat, Song of the Earth, 266.
48
49
Kiser, “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature,” 41.
50
Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 138; quoted also in Rudd,
Greenery, 4.
16 A.J. GOLDWYN
scholarship and activism that have defined other branches of the environ-
mental humanities. The closest she comes to making a case for the con-
temporary relevance of an ecocritical reading of medieval literature is that
it “provides another step back toward understanding our roots, the sources
of the assumptions that we are only slowly beginning to recognize as dev-
astatingly destructive.”51
In prioritizing ecocriticism as a method of discourse analysis, a means
of analyzing from a literary perspective, a way of reading with an eye to the
depiction of the natural world, Douglass and Kiser position medieval eco-
criticism as a (to use Bate’s term) pre-political subfield concerned with
developing an environmental imagination rather than political activism,
and this has been the model for subsequent works on medieval literature.52
Two major book-length works of ecocriticism on medieval literature,
Gillian Rudd’s Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English
Literature (2007) and Alfred Siewer’s Strange Beauty: Ecocritical
Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (2009), both place the word in
their title, though they only pay lip service to contemporary politics (in
the case of Rudd) or ignore it entirely (in the case of Siewer).53 Instead,
51
Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 159.
52
Though she does add that “a thoughtful critic might also consider whether the text does
in fact set out to do what he or she feels it ought: is a conservationist message the point of
the work?” (Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 138). In this, she
presages an apolitical branch of ecocriticism best articulated by Jonathan Bate. In his 2002
Song of the Earth, Bate argues that “it would be quixotic to suppose that a work of literary
criticism might be an appropriate place in which to spell out a practical programme for bet-
ter environmental management. That is why ecopoetics should begin not as a set of assump-
tions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way of reflecting upon
what it means to dwell with the earth. Ecopoetics must concern itself with consciousness”
(Bate, Song of the Earth, 266). In response to this line, Egan argues that “Bate’s claim that
ecocriticism should be necessarily non- (or in his phrase pre-) political is as absurd as it
would be in the fields of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial and queer criticism” (Egan, Green
Shakespeare, 44).
53
The study of nature in the environment has long been an important area of inquiry in
medieval literature; the distinction here is between analyses of nature from a literary perspec-
tive and the analysis of literature from an ecocritical perspective. Works on natural themes
without the explicit use of an ecocritical framework include, for example, such work as Stone,
Ethics of Nature; Hanawalt and Kiser, Engaging with Nature; and Howe and Wolfe, Inventing
Medieval Landscapes. Although Howe and Wolfe themselves do not use the term, one
reviewer noted that “this volume may likely become a foundational text in medievalist eco-
criticism” (Faletra, “Review,” 101). Among such works too must be classed the older but still
influential collection of Pearsall and Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World.
the authors offer literary analysis from the ecocritical perspective without
the political component. Rudd, for instance, suggests that “understanding
ourselves as constituent parts of a wider whole and further appreciating
that this means that our actions have consequences for all other elements
of the world is part of the notion of interconnectedness that is central to
green thinking.”54 This kind of “green thinking,” a corollary to Buell’s
“environmental imagination,” she suggests,
will include such questions as: how far humans are regarded part of the
world, how far set apart from it; whether nature (or Nature) is seen in hier-
archical terms or as made up of a vast array of different things each equally
worthy; whether humans are stewards of nature with a duty to protect as
well as use it, a privileged species who by nature and divine decree may
exploit the world around with impunity, or simply one of a vast number of
life forms, no more or less valuable.55
The pre-political model of ecocriticism has also appeared in medieval

ecofeminism: in her Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds
(2011), Lesley Kordecki offers a less ideological definition of ecofemi-
nism: “Thinkers concerned with both ecology and feminism recognize the
similar forces at work in the parallel diminishment of women and nature.”56
In contrast to Gaard, who speaks in terms of the political dichotomy of
oppression and liberation, Kordecki’s literary tone is one of “diminish-
ment.” Whereas ecocritics of contemporary literature deal in words such
as “activism” and “practice,” Rudd and other medieval ecocritics use
“understanding” and “appreciating,” decidedly more contemplative
words. Thus, though ecocritical practice has been conceived not only as a
discourse of literary, social, and cultural analysis, but also one of protest,
or, in the words of one ecocritic, “to think and act ecopolitically and
ecocritically,”57 that is, to find a synthesis between politics and scholarship,
the principles of environmental critical theory have nevertheless been mar-
shaled for non-political ends.
54
Rudd, Greenery, 6.
55
Rudd, Greenery, 5.
56
Kordecki, Ecofeminist Subjectivities, 6. She does allow that “in some quarters, the disci-
pline emerges as an advocate for social or political change” (Kordecki, Ecofeminist
Subjectivities, 6).
57
18 A.J. GOLDWYN
The pervasiveness of this ecocritical model for medieval studies can be

seen in Valerie B. Johnson’s 2015 article “Ecomedievalism: Applying
Ecotheory to Medievalism and Neomedievalism.” Her subject matter is
the way in which neomedieval texts (that is, texts written after the Middle
Ages that nevertheless imagine a medieval setting) reconstruct medieval
environments. If the great bar to connecting ecocriticism’s politically
activist orientation to medieval literature is the lack of a direct connection
between these texts and the contemporary political moment broadly con-
ceived, then neomedievalism would seem to be one place where medieval
and modern meet and would thus be ripe for ecocritical analysis, as writers
living in the Anthropocene retroject their own environmental ideologies
onto an imaginary—and modern—medieval past.58 And yet, not only does
she eschew such readings, she sees this as one of the virtues of the disci-
pline’s more mature period: “Ecocriticism’s rapid theorization has allowed
the field to move beyond the political activism that characterized its ori-
gins, and now offers an opportunity to begin academic study of the fic-
tional environments in neomedievalisms.”59 Implied in this phrasing is
that it was only once the political activism was abandoned that the aca-
demic study could begin. In this light, it is perhaps no surprise that the
first two sources she references are Douglass and Rudd.60 Douglass, Rudd,
Bate, and these other critics, however, have not given up on activism as a
core component of ecocriticism; rather, they have offered an alternative
model of scholar-activism, one concerned with exposing the ideologies
and patterns of thought that manifest themselves in destructive environ-
mental practice. This “pre-political” attempt to develop an environmental
imagination is perhaps less direct, but there is as yet no evidence proving
the greater efficacy—or efficacy at all—of either approach.
The development of ecocriticism has not followed a single path; rather,
ecocritics working in different disciplines have domesticated various
aspects of ecocritical theory to suit the requirements of their period, genre,
language, or other disciplinary concerns, and thus while the practice of
58
Indeed, the medieval past as modern cultural critique is the thrust of, for instance,
Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages—edited by Siewers—which connects that neomedieval work
both to Tolkien’s own time (i.e. as an allegory of World War I) and to contemporary issues
such as critical race theory.
59
Johnson, “Ecomedievalism,” 31.
60
And echoes their claims about the value of medieval ecocriticism for understanding the
roots of the current ecological moment: “A green reading of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or a
modernist poet helps articulate the past with immediate benefit to the present” (Johnson,
“Ecomedievalism,” 31 n.2).
ecocriticism by medievalists has moved steadily away from its origins in

political activism, scholars from other branches of ecocriticism, such as
postcolonial ecocriticism or ecocriticism of the global south, have become
perhaps even more concerned with politics than their counterparts in pre-
vious generations.
The question, then, is how to navigate among the various ecocriticisms
currently operating within scholarly discourse. If, as Buell suggested in
2011, “it remains an open question as to how, if at all, ecocriticism will
adjudicate between a vision of critical practice as ultimately justified by its
commitment to criticism in the service of environmentalist social action as
against a more academic-professional justification of ecocritical practice as
knowledge production or humanistic understanding,” then it seems medi-
evalists have made their choice.61 The problem, however, lies not in the
choice itself, but in the critical articulation of why such decisions were
made. Adopting the rhetoric of The Ecocriticism Reader, much ecocritical
writing, on whatever particular literature, begins with a list of the various
manifestations of the Anthropocene and environmental degradation, a
rhetorical strategy that explicitly justifies the production of that book in
these times. In ecocriticism as in all scholarship, the choice to remain apo-
litical is ultimately itself a political choice influenced by cultural norms, and
it is one that practitioners should be forced to defend, even as it has become
all but mandatory for activist scholars to justify their more overt engage-
ment with contemporary politics. At a more theoretical level, these debates
challenge scholars in all disciplines to think critically about the ethics, pur-
pose, and effectiveness of both scholarship and activism in times of crisis.
Towards a Byzantine Ecocriticism and the Ethical

Turn in Byzantine Studies
What, then, of the range, scope, and ambitions of Byzantine ecocriticism?
What is the place of Byzantine studies in the increasingly broad array of
disciplines engaged in ecocritical discourse? What contributions can
Byzantine studies offer to ecocriticism, and what can ecocriticism offer
Byzantine studies? Can Byzantine studies participate in what scholars else-
where in the humanities have labeled “the ethical turn,” that is, the growing
recognition and acceptance of literary criticism as a venue for the consider-
ation of ethical problems both inside and outside the texts themselves?
Buell, “Some Emerging Trends,” 105.

61
20 A.J. GOLDWYN
In the late 1990s, Kiser and Douglass recognized how medieval eco-
criticism could serve as a foil for the discourse’s pervasive presentism by
showing the roots of modern environmental ideology and practice, and in
that regard, the study of any pre-modern period can build on this turn.
Indeed, ecocritics of contemporary literature are themselves beginning to
recognize the limitations of these issues; as recently as 2011, Lawrence
Buell noted that
first-wave ecocriticism began as a nation-focused and especially as an Anglo-

American romanticism-and-beyond affair, focused on the two preferred
genres of nature poetry […] and, on the American side, nonfictional nature
writing. Second-wave ecocriticism has sought to press far beyond the first
wave’s characteristic limitations of genre, geography, and historical epoch.
[…] The expansion of understanding of the rightful ecocritical canon to
encompass nothing less than all the literatures of the world, with critics
throughout the world understood as having a rightful stake in ecocritical
practice, clearly is still in its early stages.62
This broadened mandate has already seen much progress: Environment

at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (2011) and
Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015) represent two such attempts to
apply ecocriticism beyond the Anglo-American context. Less progress has
been made in medieval ecocriticism, though Connie Scarborough’s
Inscribing the Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to Medieval Spanish
Literature (2013) marks one notable exception, if not to Europe, then at
least to the Anglo-Irish tradition.63 Putting Byzantium on the ecocritical
map, and from a comparative perspective that shows the ideological links
between the Greek East and the Latin West and between medieval Greece
and Classical and modern literature, as well as the naturecultural specifics
that determined the manifestations of difference, contributes both to this
broadening of the mandates of geography and to periodization within the
discipline.
62
Buell, “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends,” 91, 93.
63
Following Rudd, Scarborough offers a pre-political version of ecocriticism: “By concen-
trating on canonical works that have been examined from a variety of other critical view-
points, this study hopes to add another level of awareness to the natural phenomena included
in them” (Scarborough, Inscribing the Environment, 1). The rhetoric of “awareness” and,
later, “clues to the authors’ understanding of the natural world,” as well as the omission of
an acknowledgment of the explicitly activist movements within ecocriticism, mark the work’s
approach.
Introducing Byzantine studies to ecocritics can, moreover, shape how

other non-specialists in the field describe medieval Greek naturecultures.
Thus, in The Ecocriticism Reader, the few references to Byzantium include
the oversimplified and fundamentally inaccurate assertion that
always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic sys-
tem through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards;
rising flames are the symbol of the soul’s aspiration. This view of nature was
essentially artistic rather than scientific. While Byzantium preserved and
copied great numbers of ancient Greek scientific texts, science as we con-
ceive it could scarcely flourish in such an ambience.64
Given that The Ecocriticism Reader is among the most read and cited texts
in the environmental humanities, these kinds of inaccurate generalizations
will continue to warp non-Byzantinists’ understanding of the period.
Perhaps more damning than inaccurate overgeneralizations, however, is
the widespread silence about Byzantium that pervades ecocritical dis-
course and other contemporary theoretical fields. Given that at its peak in
the mid-sixth century the Byzantine Empire encompassed almost the
entirety of the Mediterranean basin, and thus contained far more ecologi-
cal diversity than the Plantagenet holdings in Britain and Normandy that
have inspired ecocritical readings of medieval English literature,65 the
great literary, cultural, and environmental diversity represented within
Byzantine studies may have just as much to offer contemporary theorists
of the medieval West.
As to what ecocriticism can offer Byzantine studies, this great cultural
and environmental diversity offers nearly endless opportunities for reading
ecocritically. From a literary historical perspective, much yet remains
unknown about the environmental attitudes of a multifaceted culture that
lasted a thousand years and covered large and ecologically diverse swathes
of three continents and the seas and waterways that linked them. During
the so-called Byzantine Millennium, which stretched from the founding of
Constantinople as the new capital of the Eastern Roman Empire in 330 ce
to the conquest of that city by the Ottomans in 1453 ce, Byzantine letters
as well as visual and material culture flourished in a variety of genres, and
was produced in ecological contexts ranging from the high plateaus,
64
White, “Historical Roots,” 10.
65
See, for instance, Siewer, Strange Beauty, which focuses only on the symbolic significance
of the sea in Irish lore.
22 A.J. GOLDWYN
deserts, and mountains of Anatolia to the many islands of the Aegean and
the jagged coastlines of mainland Greece as well as the great urban centers
of the Empire.
Perhaps because of this, the Byzantine environment has been the sub-
ject of sustained inquiry by Byzantinists for some time, particularly histo-
rians and archaeologists. The bibliography on the subject is too
voluminous to give anything other than a cursory summary here.
Nevertheless, a sample of representative recent works will show the diver-
sity of scholarship on the subject. Paul Magdalino’s Studies on the History
and Topography of Byzantine Constantinople (2007) and Anthony Bryer
and David Winfield’s The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the
Pontos (1985), for instance, demonstrate the interest in both urban and
rural environments, while Nevra Necipoglu’s Byzantine Constantinople:
Monuments, Topography and Everyday Life (2001) demonstrates that such
studies are not restricted to either the political elite or the religious elite.
Anthony Robert Littlewood, Henry Maguire, and Joachim Wolschke-
Bulmahn’s Byzantine Garden Culture (2002) and, more recently, Ragnar
Hedlund’s Byzantine Gardens and Beyond (2013) and Brooke Shilling
and Paul Stephenson’s Fountains and Water Culture (2016), demon-
strate the increasing interest in human interventions in cultivated nature.
Such a list could go on ad infinitum.
These works have been instrumental in increasing Byzantinists’ under-
standing and appreciation of the medieval Greek environmental context
and its role in shaping issues as diverse as imperial politics, international
trade, and the intimate concerns of daily life. Ecocriticism, however, differs
from the study of ecology in (at least) one important way. Where ecologists
are concerned with empiricism and the historical reconstruction of Byzantine
environments, ecocriticism is almost indifferent to these actualities. Rather,
it is concerned with more subjective measures: how people think and feel
about the environment, what values and ideologies guide their interaction
with it. Thus, the observable or tactile environment that is the main source
of ecological studies is, in ecocriticism, secondary to the subjective and
impressionistic individual and communal experience of it. These empiricist
studies of the real world of the Byzantine Empire have been productively
supplemented by analyses of the imaginary world as it appears in Byzantine
literature. Charles Barber’s “Reading the Garden in Byzantium: Nature and
Sexuality” (1992) offers an initial foray into the literary aspects of the imag-
ined Byzantine world, while Ingela Nilsson’s Erotic Pathos, Rhetorical
Pleasure (2001) examines, among other things, the literary significance of
gardens in the fictional literature of the twelfth century.
The spiritual aspects of the environment in hagiographical and theo-

logical texts,66 the precise topographical details in military historiography,
the land use policies described in imperial legal codes and farming guides,67
the astrological and climatological interpretations in allegorical and occult
texts, the use of animal imagery in visual and material culture,68 and an
economic study of food insecurity and eating practices, could all equally
serve as examples of the utility of a Byzantine ecocriticism across genres:69
each would reveal some aspect of the multifaceted Byzantine experience of
and attitude towards nature and the environment. Yet two developments
in recent scholarship have facilitated an ecocritical analysis of the medieval
Greek romance as a staging ground for the entry of the discourse into
Byzantine studies that might then be fruitfully expanded to incorporate
other genres within Byzantine literature. Foremost among these is the
development of ecocritical analyses of Western medieval literature, much
of which has favored the medieval romance as the subject of ecocritical
inquiry—perhaps for reasons similar to those listed above. Second is the
increased interest in East–West literary, cultural, and political ties in the
Middle Ages, a field that has also reframed the medieval romance as a pan-
European (and pan-Mediterranean) literary genre.70 This increasing focus
on comparative approaches to the romances has created theoretical and
66
For two non-ecocritical works that nevertheless examine similar considerations of eccle-
siastical power and perceptions of ecology and the environment, see Della Dora, Landscape,
Nature, and the Sacred and Theokritoff, Living in God’s Creation.
67
An interesting example of the ways in which ecocriticism, animal studies, and Marxist
and postcolonial criticism intersect in this regard in medieval England is Dorothy
Yamamoto’s examination of the way the creation of royal game preserves by the Norman
conquerors of England, which disrupted the economies and food chains of the indigenous
Saxon inhabitants, led to a variety of legal regulations and disciplinary measures (103ff.).
68
As, for instance, the chapter on “Animals and Magic in Byzantine Art” in Dauterman
Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, 58–96.
69
See, for instance, Dauterman Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, who argue: “In the
imperial palace, art combined with cuisine to project messages of imperial mastery and con-
trol. The exotic dishes of the imperial table and the astonishing acrobatics that accompanied
them were both part of a larger theater of the Byzantine court that was intended to demon-
strate the emperor’s special power over nature” (42).
70
Cupane and and Krönung, Fictional Storytelling, is the latest entry in the expanding
bibliography on this subject, and shows also the interest not just in Byzantine–European
relations, the traditional framework for this kind of study, but now also the increasing recog-
nition of Byzantine relations with Asia. The background to and future of the field in this
regard is Panagiotis Agapitos’ “Contesting Conceptual Boundaries: Byzantine Literature and
Its History,” in which he argues for a broader understanding of Byzantine literary history
geographically and temporally.
24 A.J. GOLDWYN
methodological pathways for transferring modes of analysis developed for

Western medieval literature to Byzantine literature.
Though ecocriticism’s tendency towards interdisciplinarity means that
scholarly work that describes contemporary literature or the medieval
West can be usefully applied to the medieval Greek romance, the very real
environmental, geographic, political, and cultural differences between the
Byzantine Empire and these other cultures hint at the limits of applying
theory developed in one context to another. These differences, coupled
with the vast corpus of medieval Greek literary production, thus point to
the need for a specifically Byzantine ecocriticism that poses questions such
as: Can one speak of a Byzantine environmental ideology within the wide
variety of Byzantine experiences of nature? Can literary texts or visual or
material culture be used to examine it? Did Byzantines have a sense of
environmentalism? Was it one of care or exploitation, and how and why
did it develop in this way? What parts of nature were treated as subject and
which as object? Scholarship such as that produced by Rudd, Kordecki,
Karl Steel,71 and others has proven that a methodology drawn from tradi-
tional philological and historicist perspectives that includes close reading
of literary works in their historical and linguistic contexts can answer these
kinds of questions; it can identify the ideologies of power and control that
justified human control over nature and the interlocking set of patriarchal
forces that prioritized the experiences and encounters of certain groups
over those whose experiences and encounters were marginalized within
this literary production.72
And yet, though much progress has been made in the twenty years
since Glotfelty asserted that “you would never suspect that the earth’s life
support systems were under stress” if you looked at “the major publica-
tions of the literary profession”—as evidenced not just by the publications
mentioned above, but by the myriad volumes omitted, not to mention the
flagship journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the
Environment and the proliferation of professorships, courses, and degree
71
Steel, How to Make a Human.
72
Patriarchy has become a widely accepted if hotly contested term; perhaps the earliest use
of the term in Byzantine studies was by Catia Galatariotou in 1984, where she defines it as
“a system of social order in which power and the means of acquiring it and perpetuating it
(economic, political, ideological) has been assumed by the male sex,” though she rightly
cautions against a universalist notion, suggesting that it is “as varied and elaborate as the
forces at play within each historical moment” (Galatariotou, “Holy Women and Witches,”
56, 57).
offerings in the environmental humanities—the causes and consequences

of anthropogenic climate change continue to expand at yet increasing
rates. What, then, of the activist and advocacy functions of ecocriticism,
particularly with regards to medieval—and thus Byzantine—literature?
In the article that was the first fruits of my research into ecocriticism, I
spent the opening pages examining the politically activist orientation of
ecocritical theory; surveying various ecocritics’ claims to contemporary
political relevance, I wrote: “Even if claims [for contemporary political
relevance] could be sustained for Byzantine literature, it is not at all obvi-
ous that they should be. Can ecocriticism be divorced from contemporary
politics? And, if so, what would such an ecocriticism look like?” I then
spent several pages trying to construct a model for Byzantine ecocriticism
that separated the political from the literary analytical, concluding that
“what is left after the removal of the political overtones is a way of reading
texts that prioritizes the reading of the natural world, of human interac-
tion with it and the ideology and mechanics of its depiction,” a claim I still
believe to be valid and true; and yet—in light of the increasingly dire state
of the environment and the indifference or outright denial expressed by
both the average global citizen (including many of our students) and their
political leadership—the ecocriticism of medievalists such as Rudd and
myself, which argues for ecocriticism as a critical category of discourse
analysis without the activism, seems perhaps also insufficient.73
Thus, rather than thinking about how to separate contemporary envi-
ronmental issues from medieval Greek literature, one of my major aims in
this book is to address just these kinds of questions: To what extent can
medieval ecocriticism help us in thinking about the environment today?74
How deep are the roots of contemporary environmental ideology? Is
Byzantine literature relevant to contemporary ecological and environmental
73
Thus leading, for instance, to Myrto Veikou’s characterization of this work as “an excel-
lent way of adopting approaches from other fields while theoretically updating them […] by
diverting this practice’s theoretical framework, away from political connotations previously
attributed to it by other scholars and towards a different, highly meaningful use in the inves-
tigation of historical cultures” (Veikou, “Space in Texts and Space as Text,” 147). As will be
made clear from what follows, I would like to revise my own position on the separation of
the contemporary/political from the historical/scholarly.
74
Douglass 1998 argues along similar lines that “possibly the most important part of this
project is then an effort to determine both what ecocriticism can do for medieval studies and
what medieval studies can do for the environment” (138), an early acknowledgment of the
difficulty of finding relevance between medieval literature and the current environmental
context.
26 A.J. GOLDWYN
issues? Can Byzantine studies play a role in direct academic activism or in

cultivating the environmental imagination?
In her 1998 article, Douglass argued that “possibly the most important
part of this project is then an effort to determine both what ecocriticism
can do for medieval studies and what medieval studies can do for the
environment”;75 that the question was posed so long ago and has yet to
receive a satisfactory answer (or, rather, has received numerous contradic-
tory answers) provides an early acknowledgment of the difficulty of
finding a relevant link between medieval literature and the current envi-
ronmental context. I hope this book, in addition to shedding light on
Byzantine environmental ideology, comparative approaches to the medi-
eval romance, and medieval Greek aesthetics, can help answer some ques-
tions with which Byzantinists have yet to engage: Does Byzantine studies
as a discipline have a role to play in the current battles over climate change,
indigenous rights, and other environmental issues? Should it play such a
role even if it can? What are the pros and cons not just of this kind of work,
but of the profession-wide shift that has created space for academic activ-
ism? Surely Byzantine studies should not abandon its traditional core com-
petencies and strengths in history, art history, archaeology, philology, and
so on, but is there space for environmental criticism either alongside these
or within them?76
Can Byzantine studies, in other words, participate in what critics of
cultural studies have termed “the ethical turn?” Joanna Zylinska has
argued “that an ethical sense of duty and responsibility has always consti-
tuted an inherent part of the cultural studies project,”77 and in this sense
there is no need to make the case that Byzantinists should be engaged in
academic activism—they already are. Inherent within the discipline are
commitments to certain fundamental Humanist values and responsibilities
toward the preservation of the cultural production of the past (in terms of,
to name a few examples, its architecture, literature, and material culture)
and the creation and transmission of knowledge about the past (through
75
Douglass, “Ecocriticism,”138.
76
See, for instance, Veronica della Dora’s Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium,
which, though not explicitly ecocritical, nevertheless addresses the confluence of power and
perception, noting the ways in which imperial and ecclesiastical ideologies shaped the con-
struction of nature and the natural world.
77
Zylinska, The Ethics of Cultural Studies, ix and esp. ix n.1 for bibliography on the ethical
turn. Boothroyd, Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Cultures builds on this idea (3ff.). See
also Davis and Womack, Mapping the Ethical Turn.
the preservation of its writing and analysis of various political and social
structures). More broadly, Byzantinists are committed to certain profes-
sional values shared among scholars: integrity in scholarly processes and
production, the free exchange of ideas, the importance of education.
Indeed, the choice of subject matter, of what research questions to ask and
answer, even of the decision to maintain a scholarly practice committed to
apolitical methods, are all essentially political and ethical decisions.
According to what ethics are these decisions being made?
Byzantinists are equally engaged in more direct forms of activism
through participation in professional organizations that have adopted
issues advocacy as part of their mission. The American Historical
Association (AHA) website, for instance, has a subheading link for “News
& Advocacy,” with a further subheading “Statements and Resolutions of
Support and Protest,” which contains both its document outlining when
it can engage in activism (“Guiding Principles on Taking a Public Stance”)
and a list of the various letters, resolutions, and statements of support and
opposition it has registered over issues such as the exercise of freedom of
speech, destruction of historical artifacts and documents, education
reform, and other concerns both within the United States and overseas.78
Indeed, the pace of such activism has dramatically increased recently, as
the website lists five such actions in 2007; one for each of the years 2008,
2009, and 2010; none for 2011 and 2012; three for 2013; and then ten,
nine, and eight for the years 2014, 2015, and 2016. Similar pages can be
found for other major disciplinary organizations in which Byzantinists
participate, including the Modern Language Association (MLA), which
has seen a similar increase in activism and advocacy in recent years,79 and
the Society for Classical Studies (SCS, formerly the APA, the American
Philological Association).80 This is particularly true for archaeological soci-
eties, and both the Archaeological Institute of America81 and the Society
of American Archaeology82 have advocacy pages. By contrast, none of the
major organizations for Byzantine studies, including the umbrella organi-
zation for the discipline, the International Association of Byzantine Studies
78
American Historical Association, “Statements and Resolutions of Support.”
79
“The Executive Council regularly considers academic and public policy matters and
often writes letters, statements, or guidelines to address these matters” (Modern Language
Association, “Executive Council Actions”).
80
Society for Classical Studies, “SCS Policy on Public Statements.”
81
Archaeological Institute of America, “Site Preservation: Advocacy.”
82
Society for American Archaeology, “Government Affairs Program.”
28 A.J. GOLDWYN
(AEIB), nor its national subgroups, including the Byzantine Studies

Association of North America (BSANA), the Society for the Promotion of
Byzantine Studies (based in the UK), and the Australian Association of
Byzantine Studies, have similar advocacy language in their documents or
on their websites.83
The questions, then, are twofold: not whether individual Byzantinists
or the organizations to which they belong should engage in academic
activism, since they already do, but rather, whether Byzantine studies as a
discipline (as opposed to individual Byzantinists or organizations to which
they may peripherally belong) should explicitly articulate the values,
duties, and responsibilities to which it is already committed, and whether
Byzantine studies could welcome, alongside these other commitments, a
more activist position through advocacy statements or other work by its
professional associations (and, if so, what are the appropriate causes and
means for the kinds of activism and advocacy it understands as being
within its professional purview).
Byzantine studies, like all disciplines, has a sometimes implicit and
sometimes explicit code of disciplinary ethics. Kari Weil argues that “the
ethical turn that has followed in the wake of deconstruction is an attempt
to recognize and extend care to others while acknowledging that we may
not know what the best form of care is for an other whom we cannot
presume to know. It is a concern with and for alterity, especially insofar as
alterity brings us to the limits of our own self-certainty and certainty about
the world.”84 As Byzantine studies explicitly deals with peoples not like us
(as, to some extent, do all disciplines of culture studies and area studies),
it already addresses these inherently ethical questions about alterity. But
the question is where this boundary is, and to whom we are prepared to
“extend care”: is Byzantine studies prepared to make a general commit-
ment to environmental ethics or, in the case of Weil’s focus, animal
rights?85 Though seemingly unrelated to Byzantine studies, these issues
83
This might also have to do with the issue of contemporary relevance: disciplines that are
more directly engaged with contemporary issues more frequently have such positions on
their websites. See, for instance, the advocacy statements on the websites of the Association
for Asian American Studies (“Advocacy”) and the American Studies Association (“Resolutions
and Actions”).
84
Weil, Thinking Animals, 16.
85
In her study of medieval animals, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, Joyce
Salisbury focuses on the rhetoric of care: “We treat pets with much the same care that we give
humans, acknowledging in our care our kinship with them” (2). She also suggests the con-
penetrate into virtually every corner of the discipline: the parchment man-
uscripts and ivories Byzantinists make their livings studying, for instance,
are made of the flesh and bone of dead animals.86 A relatively broad-based
global consensus has been reached to end poaching and to ban the inter-
national trade in ivory to protect elephants from extinction, but what
about the ethical obligations of art historians who study ivories to the
economic and cultural systems that perpetuate the illicit trade of these
goods?87 And what of climate change archaeology, the study of the ways in
which climate change endangers archaeological sites and of the ways in
which archaeology can identify strategies used by earlier civilizations that
faced climate-related threats?88
nection of her own work on the medieval human–animal dichotomy with contemporary
issues: “Many of our controversial animal-rights issues derive from this blurring of the
boundaries between humans and animals. If there is no difference between us, should we eat
animals? […] Further, once we believe that animals and humans share feelings in common,
should we hunt and trap animals, knowing that such treatment would cause us pain? Should
we use animals in medical experiments when we would not use humans? I hope to provide a
background for these discussions by looking at a view of animals different from our own and
seeing the transformation of this view” (2). Salisbury, like the ecocritics who would emerge
in the next decades, connects the political and cultural debates of our own time to her study
of animals in the Middle Ages through the by now familiar pre-political rhetoric of “provid-
ing background,” a claim in line with other ecocritics’ search for the roots or origins of
contemporary ideology in pre-modern texts. In another example of the way in which increas-
ing engagement of these questions within Byzantine Studies would allow for greater visibility
within Medieval Studies as a whole, Salisbury, despite the title of her work, confines herself
to the Latin West; neither Byzantium nor Constantinople appear in her index; one of the few
references to the post-Classical Greek tradition is Jon Climacus’ discussion of bestiality (88).
86
Such questions have already begun to be explored by Western medievalists. In “Legible
Skins,” Sarah Kay suggests that “the parchment book brings its own ethos along with it, and
this article explores the ethics of reading that the encounter with it involves” (14), concluding
that “in the Middle Ages the acts of reading and writing are located in the context of the
systematic exploitation of animals, and more generally of a power hierarchy in which the
skins of weaker animals may be used as a writing surface for the exploits of those that are
stronger” (30).
87
Glenn Peers’ recent book review essay addresses somewhat the questions of both the
Anthropocene and the role of ivory in his discussion of a Byzantine ivory diptych picturing
Adam naming the animals. Peers does not address the question of the ethics of contemporary
art historians’ use of ivory, instead demonstrating how the materiality of the object itself as
bone demonstrates the link between the humans and animals depicted on it (Peers, “Adam’s
Anthropocene”).
88
See, for instance, Curry, “Climate Change,” for a survey of some sites at risk due to cli-
mate change, and Van der Noort, Climate Change Archaeology, for the ways in which archae-
ology can offer insight into current rising sea levels.
30 A.J. GOLDWYN
These questions tie in again to the related issues of the Anthropocene

and the environmental imagination (or green thinking or ecological
thought). Dave Boothroyd argues in his chapter “The Ethical Turn and
the Ethicisation of Everything” that
across the critical humanities and social studies […] ethical thinking figures
in the identification of disciplinary subject matters, and is also an element of
its reflexive self-understanding of its own activities; and that these both
inherently call for ethical scrutiny, awareness, sensibility as well as justifica-
tion. […] Cultural studies during this period, for example, has increasingly
come to understand itself as an ethico-political project; it has embraced, in
some quarters at least, its own “ethicisation.”89
Like these other disciplines, Byzantine studies advocates a certain kind of

ethical—and political—commitment towards understanding other subjec-
tivities, in this case, those of the people who lived centuries ago in the
eastern Mediterranean basin. Two fundamental questions that this book
hopes to address are whether Byzantine studies will explicitly ally itself
with what Boothroyd calls this “ethico-political project” and whether,
having done so, it will extend an ethico-politics of care beyond the alterity
of the Byzantines as subjective others to include commitments to the non-
human subjects who lived alongside Byzantines and live alongside us as
well: animals and the natural environment.90
Ecocriticism and the Medieval Greek Romance

In The Medieval Greek Romance, the seminal study that classified the genre
and that has since been the subject of much debate, Roderick Beaton iden-
tified the sixteen works that he believed comprise the genre, with what he
terms the “proto-romance” Digenis Akritis,91 which he dates to the early
part of the eleventh century, at the head of the tradition,92 and the
89
Boothroyd, Ethical Subjects, 3.
90
For further discussion of the subjectivity of the Other and its roots in Levinasian ethical
philosophy, see Boothroyd 3ff.
91
Transliteration of the name of the work has varied, with Digenes Akrites, Digenes Akritas,
and other forms being used interchangeably in the scholarship. I have followed each author’s
own spelling when quoting, and followed Jeffreys’ use of Digenis Akritis elsewhere.
92
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 185. Recent scholarship has challenged the early dat-
ing. Though the stories might be early, the oldest surviving manuscript is from later, a point
emphasized by Charis Messis: “While the dating of the Urtext to the twelfth century is a
seventeenth-century Erotokritos at the end; the last, Beaton argues, was

the only non-medieval work.93 Though the authors of many of these works
remain anonymous, those whose names we do know—such as Theodore
Prodromos and Constantine Manasses—suggest that these were works
commissioned by emperors and empresses and had as their intended audi-
ence the imperial family and the high-ranking officials who moved in
courtly circles.94
Though they differ in terms of origin, with some coming from the oral
folk tradition, some from translations of Western sources, some from
imitations of the ancient Greek novel, and some from what might best be
termed original imaginative genre fiction, and though they differ in terms
of language, with some in prose and others in verse, and some in the
highly archaizing Attic register and others in the vernacular, what binds
them is a certain kind of subject matter—they are what Beaton calls “tales
of love, death and adventure.”95 But more than that, they are the coming-
of-age tales of aristocratic young men and women, describing the trials
and tribulations of young lovers who both defy and embrace the social
conventions surrounding romantic marriage, and who wander from city to
conjecture, based on scattered references and the ‘common sense’ of modern scholars, the
dating of the Grottaferrata version to the fourteenth century is a textual reality that we need
to take into serious consideration” (Messis, “The relationship between romance and hagiog-
raphy”). See also Livanos, “A Case Study in Byzantine Dragon-Slaying,” with bibliography,
and Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 30. For the complicated textual and manuscript tradi-
tion, see Jeffreys, introduction to Digenis Akritis, xvlii–xxx.
93
For the definitional parameters of the genre and a history of its development, see Beaton,
The Medieval Greek Romance and the critical response by Agapitos and Smith, The Study of
the Medieval Greek Romance. A different set of generic qualifiers can also be found in the
so-called SO Debate, for which, see Agapitos, “Genre, Structure and Poetics in the Byzantine
Vernacular Romances of Love,” and the various responses, which remains one of the most
important discussions of the romances. For the works included in (and excluded from) the
genre, their dates, and a rationale for the generic taxonomy, see Agapitos, “Genre, Structure
and Poetics,” 12–26, esp. 12–14.
Further subdivisions can be made based on chronology and other generic aspects; the
twelfth-century Komnenian novels, named after the dynasty under which they were pro-
duced, draw more heavily from the ancient novel and feature more realistic depictions of
society and nature than do the later Palaiologan romances, which are more closely related to
the chivalric narratives of Western Europe. As with any genre, disputes inevitably seem to
arise over names, boundaries, and qualifiers; following Beaton and Agapitos and Smith,
“romances” seems the best umbrella term for these kinds of narratives, and so will be used
here.
94
As detailed in Nilsson, “Romantic Love in Rhetorical Guise,” 46–56.
95
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, xiii.
32 A.J. GOLDWYN
country and across the seas before (most often) their eventual happy mar-
riages and ascension to the political and economic power that is their
birthright.
Because the protagonists of these works wander so far and wide, they
encounter more different kinds of nature than perhaps is met in any
other genre: real and imaginary landscapes, fantastical and mundane cit-
ies, towns, and castles; rural and urban built environments, deserts and
mountains, land and sea—all of which are populated with creatures large
and small, ordinary and marvelous. The primacy of nature and the vari-
ety of human encounters with nature mark these works as fitting sub-
jects of ecocritical analysis. But, in light of ecocriticism’s theoretical shift
towards intersectionality, the romances also offer opportunities for
thinking about the relationship between the environment and other
human concerns. Indeed, because they are travelers and because of the
twists and turns of (mis)fortune that mark their adventures, the aristo-
cratic heroes of romance meet a broad cross-section of humans as well:
their encounters with Greeks, Arabs, and Ethiopians offer avenues for
thinking about postcolonial ecocriticism; their encounters with kings,
herdsmen, and sailors—indeed, their own not infrequent enslavement—
allows for a Marxist consideration of the intersection of ecocriticism and
labor/capital; while their flights from city to country in pursuit of spaces
where they can fulfill their desires for romantic love free from social,
cultural, and political constraints suggests the possibility of queer eco-
criticism. As works that focus on the subjectivity of both men and
women and that narrate the different kinds of encounters with nature
experienced by them, these works open themselves up to ecofeminist
analysis as well.
In the preface to the new edition of Masks of Conquest marking the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the book’s original edition, Gauri Viswanathan
writes: “Perhaps the most significant effect of postcolonialism—with all its
shortcomings, blind spots, and metropolitan evasions—is that the curricu-
lar study of English can no longer be studied innocently or inattentively to
the deeper contexts of imperialism, transnationalism, and globalization in
which the discipline first articulated its mission.”96 Substituting Greek for
English and ecocriticism for postcolonialism offers a template for the kinds
of goals Byzantine ecocriticism—with all its shortcomings and blind spots
and interdisciplinary squabbles—might have in the future: that no work of
96
Viswanathan, Masks, xi.
literature (broadly conceived) or cultural production can be studied inno-

cently or inattentively to the deeper contexts of the Anthropocene, anthro-
pogenic climate change, and the intersecting forms of patriarchal
oppression in which the discipline first articulated its mission. Scholars in
the humanities, and particularly those working on pre-modern literatures,
have often found it difficult to articulate the relevance of their discipline to
current events, much less to effect reparative change for those causes in
which they find ethical imperatives of action. This book represents my
attempt to do just that.
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CHAPTER 2
Zoomorphic and Anthomorphic Metaphors

in the “Proto-Romance” Digenis Akritis
The collection of oral folk tales of the tenth and eleventh centuries that
were codified as Digenis Akritis in the thirteenth or fourteenth century
spawned a convoluted and widely variant textual tradition that presents
challenges that are impossible to reconcile in a work not specifically
devoted to the study of manuscripts, oral history, and scribal practice. The
multiplicity of versions and the instability of their dating calls into ques-
tion Roderick Beaton’s grand claim that the “proto-romance of Digenis
Akritis” spawned “the Renaissance of [the] genre” of the medieval
romance in Byzantium.1 Of the six surviving manuscripts, only G, so-
called after the Grotaferratta library where it is held, and E, after the
Escorial library, are from before the sixteenth century. Watermarks indi-
cate E could be as late as 1485, though such markings can only rule out
later dates; they can neither prove nor disprove earlier ones. G, by con-
trast, “is decisively the earliest surviving manuscript” and dates to “the late
thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries,”2 representing the earliest extant
codification of a story that may have existed orally for several centuries.3
Even if the later date is accepted and the work can no longer be said to
stand temporally at the head of the romance tradition in Byzantium, it
1
For the manuscript traditions and its attendant problems of interpretation, see Jeffreys,
“The Afterlife of Digenes Akrites,” 144 and, in greater detail, Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis,
xvlii–xxx.
2
Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, xvliii.
3
The relationship between G and E and a chart of their similarities and differences in plot
can be found in Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, xxvii.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6_2
40 A.J. GOLDWYN
nevertheless can be treated as a “proto-romance” in the sense that many

of the paradigmatic themes of the genre are present: the precocious youth
of the hero, his far wandering in search of love, and the many (often vio-
lent) trials and tribulations he must overcome to woo, wed, and protect
his beloved. From the ecocritical perspective, too, these events—and the
figurative language used to narrate them—are representative of the ideol-
ogies of patriarchal control that manifest themselves in a male-centric
world dominated by violence.4 The story is divided into two parts: the
so-called “Lay of the Emir,” which describes how a Christian woman is
abducted by a Muslim emir, from which union comes Digenis, hero of the
“Digeneid”; and the second part of the narrative, which presents a heroic
biography of all the people and animals he kills and the various women he
rapes as he brings patriarchal order to the Greek–Syrian border.
Ecocritics in general and medieval ecocritics of Western medieval litera-
ture have long stressed the importance of metaphor in analyzing the ways
in which environmental ideologies are made manifest in literary works;5
indeed, Annette Kolodny organized one of the foundational texts of eco-
criticism around an analysis of the evolution of natural metaphors in
American literature, arguing in favor of “the possibility that metaphor
systems may contain, encapsulated, the group’s (be it tribe or nation)
most ancient heritages and, in some sense, trace its psychological and his-
torical development.”6 In that light, the author of the Digenis uses two
kinds of nature metaphors frequently deployed by medieval writers in the
West: zoomorphic metaphors, that is, metaphors comparing humans to
wild and domesticated animals; and anthomorphic metaphors, that is,
metaphors comparing humans to both individual plants and flowers as
well as larger units of organization, such as forests, cultivated gardens, and
4
In arguing that Digenis reflects the views of the period (he dates it to the “late eleventh
or very early twelfth century” [189]), Paul Magdalino writes: “Digenes Akrites is a tale of
love and war, sex and violence. As we should expect, honour in the heroic world it portrays
is predominantly male honour, and consists very largely in the glory (δόξα) won by the dis-
play of ‘manliness’ (ἀνδρεία)” (“Honour Among the Romaioi,” 190). Megan Moore points
to the as yet unexplored possibility of reading Digenis as a “platform for reading about noble
identities in the borderlands” that could “flesh out exactly what it might mean to be a noble
participating in the colonial project” (Exchanges in Exoticism, 35), which would bring a
postcolonial reading to the types of gendered and environmental control discussed here.
5
Glotfelty lists “How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it?” as
among the necessary questions for ecocritics (Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xix).
6
Kolodny, The Lay of the Land, 149.
ZOOMORPHIC AND ANTHOMORPHIC METAPHORS… 41
agricultural and pasture land.7 When analyzed ecocritically, such meta-

phors reveal the ways in which Digenis constructs masculinity on the sub-
jugation and instrumental use (and abuse) of animals, women, and the
environment, denying them both subjectivity and agency.8 The gendered
and ecocritical significance of the use of these kinds of metaphors has
already been demonstrated by ecocritics working on Western medieval
literature.
Lovers as Hunters and Gardeners in Chaucer:

An Ecocritical Framework
Rebecca Douglass identified two stories within Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) as paradigms for ecocritical analysis of
metaphor in medieval English literature—The Miller’s Tale and the The
Knight’s Tale—and the ecocritical framework she and subsequent ecocrit-
ics writing about these two stories developed for the examination of
anthomorphic and zoomorphic metaphors can lay the foundation for an
analysis of the use of nature metaphors in the roughly contemporary
romances written on the other side of Europe. The Miller’s Tale contains
one of the more famous passages in the Chaucerian corpus: the long and
7
These metaphors are thus the opposite of anthropomorphic metaphors, which use human
(from the Greek anthropos) attributes as vehicles for describing non-human subjects. The
metaphors to be discussed here compare humans alternatively to animals (from the Greek
zoon) or plants (from the Greek anthos, meaning flower). Metaphors specifically about trees
(dendron) should be better termed “dendromorphic,” a term used here for that specific
purpose, while I use anthomorphic for both flower and plant metaphors more generally.
Similarly, “theromorphia” (from the Greek therios, for beast or animal) could also be used
instead of zoomorphia, but as the former already exists in English, with a rather technical
scientific use for describing human behavioral or anatomical reversion to animal forms, I
prefer the latter.
8
An insight explored without reference to Byzantium by Andrée Collard: “In patriarchy,
nature, animals and women are objectified, hunted, invaded, colonised, owned, consumed
and forced to yield and to produce (or not). This violation of the integrity of wild, spontane-
ous Being is rape. […] As with women as a class, nature and animals have been kept in a state
of inferiority and powerlessness in order to enable men as a class to believe and act upon their
‘natural’ superiority/dominance. I have used animals as a window to the death-oriented
values of patriarchal society partly from a deep concern for their wellbeing and partly because
man’s treatment of them exposes those values in their crudest, most undisguised form”
(Collard, Rape of the Wild, 1).
42 A.J. GOLDWYN
elaborate description of Alisoun, the young woman at the center of a love

triangle, comparing her to a variety of plants and animals:9
She was ful moore blisful on to see

Than is the newe pere-jonette tree,
And softer than the wolle is of a wether.
[…]
But of hir song, it was as loude and yerne
As any swalwe sittynge on a berne.
Therto she koude skippe and make game,
As any kyde or calf folwynge his dame.
Hir mouth was sweete as bragot or the meeth,
Or hoord of apples leyd in hey or heeth.
Wynsynge she was, as is a joly colt,
Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt.
A brooch she baar upon hir lowe coler,
As brood as is the boos of a bokeler.
Hir shoes were laced on hir legges hye.
She was a prymerole, a piggesnye,
For any lord to leggen in his bedde,
Or yet for any good yeman to wedde.10
Sweeter was she by far to look upon

Than is a pear-tree in its early bloom;
And softer than the wool upon a wether.
[…]
But when she sang, it was as brisk and clear
As any swallow perching on a barn.
And she would skip and frolic, and make play
Like any kid or calf behind its dam.
Her mouth was sweet as mead, or ale and honey,
Or store of apples laid in heather or hay.
9
In her discussion of “the metaphors used to describe Alisoun,” Douglass notes that “she
is described primarily via two kinds of natural comparisons: with animals and with flowers”
(“Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 154). In “Ecochaucer,” Sarah Stanbury calls
metaphor “the central poetic trope by which writers explore relationships among things” and
wonders “how does Chaucer, through metaphor, relate terms from the nonhuman living
world (such as flowers or animals) to people?” (2).
10
MT I 3247–3249; 3257–3270. All citations of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English
are from Chaucer, Riverside Chaucer and are listed by tale name and line number; the cita-
tions in modern English are from David Wright and Christopher Cannon’s translation
(Chaucer, Canterbury Tales).
She was as skittish as a frisky colt,

Tall as a mast, straight as a crossbow-bolt.
She wore a brooch upon her lower collar
Broad as the boss upon a shield or buckler.
The shoes upon her legs were laced up high.
She was a peach, a dolly, and a daisy!
Fit for a prince to lay upon his bed
Or some good retainer of his to wed.11
Here Alisoun is explicitly compared to alcoholic drinks (bragot/beer and

meeth/mead at 3261), a sapling (the pear-tree at line 3248), a ram (the
wether at 3249; the OED notes that the word often applies specifically to
castrated rams), apples and honey (in lines 3261 and 3262), a bird
(swalwe/swallow in line 3258), young farm animals (kyde/kid or calf at
line 3260 and a colt at 3263), and flowers (the prymerole/primrose and
piggesnye/cuckoo-flower). With the exception of the swallow, all the ani-
mals are domesticated animals, and it is significant, too, that the animals
to which she is compared are all young.
These metaphors leave open a variety of interpretive possibilities.12 For
Derek Pearsall, who is concerned with poetics and narratology, “the over-
all effect of the description […] is one of delight at the natural energy of
this creature. […] This is the way the passage works poetically, with its
flowers, and fruit and animals, to embody a fundamental meaning of the
tale that we are not likely to miss but that we might find hard to account
for without the poetry.”13 The conclusions drawn from this structuralist or
formalist perspective are radically different than the ideological or hierar-
chical conclusions drawn by ecocritics. Douglass concludes from her anal-
ysis of this figurative language that “the end of all nature in this passage is
the creation of a sexual being […], but there is a disturbing tone in the
underlying assumption that she is above all a sexual object, a wild, natural
young creature whose purpose is to provide pleasure to the lord who
might make her his mistress, or the yeoman who might marry her.”14
11
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 84.
12
For a Lacanian reading of Alisoun as the self-aware object of male desire, see Leicester,
“New Currents,” 484–485.
13
Pearsall, “Towards a Poetics,” 105; for a broader analysis of the whole passage, see also
103–106.
14
44 A.J. GOLDWYN
Rather than Pearsall’s “delicious and seductive portrait,”15 Douglass’s

reading suggests Alisoun’s sexual exploitation.
Similarly, in her ecocritical reading of this passage, Sarah Stanbury
pushes her interpretation of these metaphors a step further, arguing that
they demonstrate the intersection of ecocritical, gendered, and Marxist
possibilities. As a woman who is objectified and dehumanized through
anthomorphic and zoomorphic metaphors, the course of her life is deter-
mined by the economic system of the time: “The final couplet reveals that
this new woman has a foregone place within the familiar rural class system:
mistress to a lord or wife to a yeoman.”16 Alisoun’s description here
touches on the pleasures she can provide for all five senses; she is the
object of the male gaze—the description is narrated, after all, by the
Miller—in its broadest sense. As a kind of food or alcohol, Alisoun’s worth
is measured in her ability to provide sensual pleasure through taste (note
that she is always a sweet food: an apple, honey) or pleasurable intoxica-
tion; as a fragrant flower, she is the object of visual and olfactory pleasure;
as one whose voice is like the chirping of the swallow, she is meant to bring
pleasure through listening.
But this pleasure-bringing function is only one aspect of the labor she
is made to do; she is also compared to a variety of domestic farm animals:
the kid and calf provide dairy and meat, the ram provides wool, and the
colt will be used for riding and farm work. Here, then, is the intersection
of these kinds of labor: providing sensual gratification for the male gaze,
and as indicated by the last lines, through sexual gratification. The Miller’s
portrayal ends with a description of her sexual utility, taking into account
the ways in which class determines the limits of female sexuality: to a yeo-
man she might be a wife, but to a lord, only a mistress.17 Neither of these
possibilities, however, allows for her own agency in choosing a husband,
much less in finding sexual satisfaction for herself. She is a farm commod-
ity, and the husband must be her farmer. Thus, the passage represents the
ways in which ecocritical analyses of anthomorphic and zoomorphic meta-
phors can illuminate the systemic hierarchies that position women, animals,
15
Pearsall, “Towards a Poetics,” 104.
16
Stanbury, “Ecochaucer,” 9.
17
Douglass, writing before the development of Marxist ecocriticism, nevertheless presages
a class-based reading: “The underlying assumptions about class may offer something to the
ecocritic as well: the lord may use the natural resources (extractively); the yeoman lives with
and on the land. It is a tempting, but almost certainly too reductive, observation”
(“Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 163 n.44).
and nature as subjugated to patriarchal society in general, and economic

systems and narrative conventions in particular: “That the action takes
place within the domestic space belonging to John the Carpenter […]
emphasizes the ways in which Alisoun, the wild young animal, is being
caged and tamed.”18 The plants and animals used to describe Alisoun are
not wild animals or wild flowers; rather; they are carefully cultivated and
domesticated ones, and the figurative language used to compare Alisoun
to these plants and animals suggests that she, like them, also has only
instrumental or decorative use to whatever man has power over her.
Douglass also investigates the use of anthomorphic and zoomorphic
metaphors to describe another Chaucerian love triangle, that of Emelye
and her two suitors, the best friends turned archenemies Palamon and
Arcite in The Knight’s Tale.19 Here, too, she demonstrates the ways in
which metaphors operate at the intersection of nature and gender, though
the metaphors in The Knight’s Tale operate under a different paradigm
than those in The Miller’s Tale: men are no longer farmers cultivating their
crops and herds; rather, Douglass analyzes the ideological and cultural
consequences of depicting men as predatory animals.
As in The Miller’s Tale, the woman at the center of the love triangle is
described using anthomorphic metaphors: Emelye is described as being
more beautiful than the lily, the flowers of May, and roses:
That Emelye, that fairer was to sene

Than is the lylie upon his stalke grene,
And fressher than the May with floures newe—
For with the rose colour stroof hire hewe,
I noot which was the fyner of hem two.20
That Emily, lovelier to look upon

Than is the lily on its stalk of green,
And fresher than the May with flowers new—
For with the rose’s colour strove her hue,
Nor can I tell the lovelier of the two.21
18
19
A detailed study of this tale from the perspective of animal studies can be found in
Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human, 132–143, esp. 139–143 for her analysis of the
animal metaphors used to describe Palamon and Arcite.
20
KT 1035–1050.
21
46 A.J. GOLDWYN
Though not as rhetorically elaborate as the description of Alisoun,

Emelye’s anthomorphism has a similar function: the metaphor, according
to Douglass, “emphasizes the soft and delicate, the domestic, and the
youthful associations of nature.”22 This depiction of Emelye through met-
aphor is mirrored by where she is as her appearance is being narrated:
And in the gardyn, at the sonne upriste,

She walketh up and doun, and as hire liste
gadereth floures, party white and rede,
To make a subtil gerland for hire hede.23
And in the garden, while the sun uprises,

She wanders here and there, and as she pleases
Goes gathering flowers, mixing white and red,
To weave a graceful garland for her head.24
Emelye is not only described as a flower, she is standing in a flower garden,

thus manifesting her anthomorphism through setting and, in that she is
using flowers to make a garland that she will wear, making herself a
human–flower hybrid. Given these terms, it is not surprising that she is
subject to the male gaze, as first Palamon and then Arcite fall in love with
her as they see her from the windows of their prison towers high above.25
But Emelye, as a creature of gentle and gently cultivated nature, stands
in sharp contrast to the zoomorphic metaphors applied to her suitors
Palamon and Arcite, who forswear their oaths of loyalty to compete for
her in a duel to the death—all without having taken into account her own
desires at all. Upon meeting for their fateful duel in a grove at the appointed
time for battle, they are described with an elaborate metaphor that posi-
tions the two as hunters and predators:
22
23
KT 1051–1054.
24
25
The Knight’s Tale has also become a central text for thinking about race and racism in
medieval literature; as Dennis Austin Britton has shown, “the Knight’s Tale is concerned with
the racial alterity of Amazonian women. Ypolita’s and Emelye’s Amazonian alterity, however,
is obscured by their white skin and aristocratic social status, both of which make them desir-
able marriage and sexual partners” (Britton, “From the Knight’s Tale to The Two Noble
Kinsmen,” 65). This is evident in the story of the Emir as well, who “οὐ μέλας ὡς Αἰθίοπες,
ἀλλὰ ξανθός, ὡραῖος” (was not black like the Ethiopians but fair and handsome) (DA 1.32).
Right as the hunters in the regne of Trace,

That stondeth at the gappe with a spere,
Whan hunted is the leon or the bere,
And hereth hym come russhyng in the greves,
And breketh bothe bowes and the leves,
And thynketh, “Heere cometh my mortal enemy!”26
Like those of Thracian huntsmen when they stand

Guarding a gap in covert with the spear
When hunting for the lion, or the bear,
And hear the beast come rushing through the groves
And breaking through the branches and the leaves,
And think, “Here comes a deadly enemy!”27
The men are described both as hunters—the ultimate predator—and as

apex predators turned into human prey—lions and bears. As their combat
ensues, the animal metaphors are reiterated, casting the heroes as yet other
kinds of predators:
Thou myghtest wene that this Palamon

In his fightyng were a wood leon,
And as a crueel tigre was Arcite;
As wilde bores gonne they to smyte,
That frothen whit as foom for ire wood.
Up to the ancle foghte they in hir blood.28
To see them fight, you’d have thought Palamon

Had been a raging ravenous lion;
And Arcita a cruel ruthless tiger.
They ran against each other, mad with ire,
Like wild boars frothing white foam, till they stood
Fighting up to the ankles in their blood.29
26
KT II 1638–1643. Yamamoto glosses this line by noting the confluence of human and
animal identities: “Arcite and Palamon are both the hunter and the hunted: each stands,
metaphorically, at ‘the gappe’—that space where human and nonhuman confront one
another and where final mastery is set at hazard” (The Boundaries of the Human, 141).
27
28
KT II 1655–1660.
29
48 A.J. GOLDWYN
Unlike Emelye and Alisoun, who are delicate flowers or domesticated ani-
mals, Palamon and Arcite “are described through natural metaphors […]
of wild animals.”30 The animals to which they are compared—in addition
to lions and bears, they are now tigers and boars—are predators, thus
complementing their role as hunters. From this, Douglass concludes that
the men demonstrate the opposite view of nature: “the wild, the fierce, the
uncontrolled killing instinct of the most dangerous animals.”31 These met-
aphors define starkly differentiated gender roles as well as point to a gen-
dered power dynamic: Emelye “is above all a sexual object, a wild, natural
young creature whose purpose is to provide pleasure to the lord.”32 She is
the prey to the predators who are courting her. Douglass points to but
does not dwell on this gendered power dynamic, although her conclusions
suggest the value of an ecofeminist reading of these passages, as it is the
same men who control nature who also control the sexual stakes for the
women. This use of metaphors constructs certain ideals of masculinity and
femininity and justifies certain modes of patriarchal control: women are
delicate plants and sweet fruits; in wandering in the garden and wearing a
garland of flowers, Emelye is not just a metaphorical flower, but becomes
one in an almost real sense.
By contrast, whereas Chaucer constructs femininity through antho-
morphism, he constructs masculinity through zoomorphism: men are
predatory animals, and the way a man proves his masculinity, and there-
fore the right to sexual control of desirable women, is through the killing
of other men and dangerous animals. This analysis of metaphor in Chaucer
has paradigmatic value for thinking about the construction of gender and
the political and social hierarchies and ideologies that support their con-
struction in analogous Byzantine texts.
The Lover as Hunter in the “Lay of the Emir”

As the “Lay of the Emir” opens, the narrator provides a general descrip-
tion of the Emir, noting how handsome he is, and noting that:
30
Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 153. Noting the ambivalent
language (“thou myghtest wene”), Yamamoto suggests the uncertainty of human–animal
identity: neither the narrator, nor the audience, nor the participants can be sure where the
human and non-human animal boundary is delineated: “the narrator tells us that he is offer-
ing only one possible, not the definitive, point of view” (The Boundaries of the Human, 142).
31
32
σύν τούτοις ἀκατάμαχαν τὴν ἰσχὺν κεκτημένος

καθ᾽ ἑκάστην ἐσχόλαζεν εἰς θηρίων πολέμους.
τόλμην πειράζων τὴν αὑτοῦ καὶ ἀνδρείαν θαυμάζων
ὡς θαῦμα πᾶσι προὔκειτο τοῖς αὐτὸν καθορῶσι.
Δεινὸν δὲ πρᾶγμα πέφηνεν εἰς τοὺς νέους ἡ δόξα.
Τῷ γὰρ πλουτεῖν διεπαρθεὶς καὶ ὄγκῳ τῆς ἀνδρείας
στρατολογεῖν ἀπήρξατο Τούρκους καὶ Διλεμίτας,
Ἀραβίτας τε ἐκλεκτοὺς καὶ πεζοὺς Τρωγλοδύτας.
[…]
†Ἐξέπνευσε† πνέων θυμοῦ κατὰ τῆς Ῥωμανίας.
As well as this he achieved unconquerable strength

and every day he found recreation in battles against wild beasts
and, testing his daring and displaying his bravery,
he became a wonder to all who observed him.
Fame has proved a serious matter for young men.
Exhilarated by his wealth and outstanding bravery,
he began to recruit Turks and Dilemites,
picked Arabs Troglodyte infantry.
[…]
He invaded Roman territory with wild fury.33
The passage reveals several important concepts for ecocritical readings of

Digenis, the first of which is the importance of hunting, and the ways in
which the instrumental killing of animals is a central marker for human
identity.34 Though ostensibly described as “recreation,” the Emir’s hunts
actually have a deeply political function: it is here that he demonstrates his
strength, and those who watch him are impressed at his ability to kill ani-
mals.35 It is through this hunting, this killing of animals that the Emir
33
DA 1.39–46, 49. Note that “πνέων θυμοῦ,” which Jeffreys translates as “wild fury,” does
not contain the naturalistic or animal connotations we might attribute to “wild”; rather, it
might more literally mean something like “raging spirit.”
34
See, for instance, the entry into medieval critical animal studies by Steel, How to Make a
Human, which argues that humans in the Middle Ages constructed their human-ness and
non-animal-ness through routine acts of violence against animals. For an introductory over-
view of the argument, see Steel, How to Make a Human, 21.
35
For a broader medieval view of the ideology of the hunt that undergirds the Emir’s
behavior, see Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human, which demonstrates the parallel
between hunting animals and the courtly romance “theme of the love-hunt” as well as the
development of the military skill that makes them “more skillful controllers of other men”
(100).
50 A.J. GOLDWYN
achieves fame, and it is through this fame that he is able to recruit soldiers
from far and wide, which leads to his military conquests and the expansion
of his empire. Killing animals through the hunt, then, is the primary means
by which the Emir builds political and military power. His empire is built
on the corpses of the animals he has killed. This instrumental use of animal
lives—that is, thinking about the value of animal lives only in terms of the
(ideological, political, or financial) value that accrues to the hunter through
taking them—is perhaps the single pervasive and dominant ideology of
animal treatment by men in the romances as a whole. And given the inter-
sectionality that joins the treatment of animals with the treatment of
women, indigenous peoples, conquered peoples, and other marginalized
figures, this instrumental ethos of exploitation is itself a dominant theme.
Indeed, after having marshaled these troops, the Emir goes on a mili-
tary campaign, “καὶ πλήθη ᾐχμαλώτευσε λαοῦ ἀναριυμήτου” (and he took
prisoner hosts of people beyond number), among whom was the “κόρην
[…] ὡραιοτάτην” (very lovely girl) who would become his wife and
Digenis’ mother.36 The military campaign of pillage and plunder echoes
the hunts by which the Emir had initially accrued his power: his power
over animals marked him as one who would also have power over weaker
people, including the inhabitants of undefended cities and women.37 In
this political context, he is a hunter of cities (and from a Marxist perspec-
tive, of the material wealth and the slave labor that comes with them);
from the feminist perspective, he is a hunter of women. Indeed, Megan
Moore argues that “cross-cultural marriage is predicated on violence
against both men (as they lose property) and women (as they are abducted),
and it imagines women in a way that seems to eschew their agency.”38
The girl’s brothers select one from among them to challenge the Emir
to single combat for her freedom and, as the Emir charges into combat,
the narrator employs a tripartite zoomorphic simile to reveal the truth of
the Emir’s predatory nature:
36
DA 1.52, 1.61. For a Byzantinist’s take on the historicity and literary context of bride
snatching in Digenis, see Mackridge, “Bride Snatching”; for the medieval period more gener-
ally, see Laiou, Consent and Coercion, especially 109–226 for Byzantium.
37
The narrator notes that “ἀποφυλάκτων τῶν μερῶν ἐκείνων τυγχανόνταν | (οἱ γὰρ ἐκεῖ
φυλάσσοντες ἔτυχον εἰς τὰς ἄκρας)” (these districts were undefended | [for the troops on
guard there were at the frontiers]) (1.54–55). For the historical context of imperial hunting
and hunting as practice for military experience, see Dennis, “Some Notes on Hunting in
Byzantium,” 2009.
38
Moore, Exchanges in Exoticism, 37.
παρευθὺς ἐπελάλησεν, εἰς τὸν κάμπον έξῆλθε,

κραυγάζων ὥσπερ ἀετὸς καὶ συρίζων ὡς δράκων,
ὡς λέων ὠρυόμενος καταπιεῖν τὸν νέον.
The emir urged his horse on and went out onto the battle-field,
shrieking like an eagle, hissing like a serpent
and roaring like a lion, to devour the young man.39
Despite the stylistic incongruity of the Emir seeming to make the very dif-
ferent sounds of three very different predators simultaneously, the purpose
of the metaphor is clear: the Emir is rendered as a sort of chimeric preda-
tor. Though he is human, the figurative language used to describe him
during the battle charge renders him like the wild animals in The Knight’s
Tale, and for similar literary and ecocritical reasons. This description of the
Emir reflects his power as a hunter,40 as each of the animals referenced—
the eagle, the serpent, and the lion—is a fierce predator.41 As these animals
are top predators, so too is the Emir in both political and martial
contexts.
The parallels between the instrumental and exploitative use of animal
life through hunting and of conquered people’s lives through slavery is
mirrored in the way he treats women. The girl whom he would later marry
was, of course, captured like prey, but more important is the issue of con-
sent, for underlying all of the Emir’s actions is the threat of physical vio-
lence.42 This, too, is made clear, for after the Emir is defeated in battle by
one of the girl’s brothers, he allows all the brothers to go in search of her.
39
DA 1.172.
40
DA 1.40 describes his skill in actual hunting.
41
Jeffreys translates δράκων as “serpent,” though one could equally propose the more
monstrous “dragon,” which is etymologically derived from the Greek; the Septuagint, for
instance, uses a different word, ὄφις, for the serpent in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:1).
42
Issues of sex, marriage, and consent in Byzantium are discussed at length in Laiou. Her
main focus is the discussion of the historical development of the legal code and the ways in
which social norms and actual cultural practice varied from the expressed letter of the law.
Her interest in the literary sources is, therefore, secondary, but she does examine the issues
in Digenis at length (198–218). About the Emir’s abduction of the girl, Laiou suggests:
“The poet is not at all interested in justifying the actions of the emir, who in any case, being
a foreigner, is outside the strictures of ecclesiastical law. On the other hand, the actions of the
girl herself, her family, and the other captive women are of interest to the poet, and to us
insofar as the poet wishes to project the image that they behaved properly” (Laiou, Consent
and Coercion, 209).
52 A.J. GOLDWYN
During their search, they come across a peasant who tells them where they
might find her:
«Διέλθετε εἰς τὸ ὑπαύχενον. εὑρήσετε ῥυάκιν.

χθὲς ἐν αὐτῳ ἐσφάξαμεν εὐγενικὰς ὡραίας,
διότι οὐκ ἐπείθοντο εἰς ἅ ταῖς ἐλαλοῦμεν.»
Ἐλάλησαν τοὺς ἵππους των, ἀπῆλθον ᾽ς τὸ ῥυάκιν.
πολλὰς σφαμμένας ἕυρηκαν εἰς τὸ ἇιμα βαρτισμένας,
ὦν μὲν αἱ χεῖρες ἔλειπον, κρανία τε καὶ πόδες,
ὦν δὲ τὰ μέλη ἄπαντα, καὶ τὰ ἔγκατα ἔξω,
γνωρισθῆναι ὑπό τινς μὴ δυνάμενα ὅλως.
“Go through the lower ravine; you will find a ditch.

Yesterday we slaughtered some lovely high-born girls in it
because they refused to do what we told them.”
They urged their horses on and went off to the ditch:
they found many girls slaughtered, soaked in blood:
some lacked hands, heads and feet,
others all their limbs and their entrails were on the ground;
no one at all could recognize them.43
These are the consequences for those girls who refused their (presumably
sexual) consent to the men who captured them: “they refused to do what
we told them.”44 And the girl’s brothers are scarcely better, for when they
find their own sister in tears, they proceed to tell her that it was only her
beauty that saved her, and then marry her off to the Emir anyway. Her
rhetorical sweetness to him, therefore, could indicate not so much a
change in feeling from the terrified girl whom her brothers found a pris-
oner in tears, but a change in façade, knowing what had happened to those
girls who had refused their role as sex slaves for the men who had con-
quered them.45 Megan Moore argues that “the rapt foreshadows the
43
DA 1.223–230.
44
Laiou, citing this passage, adds: “Surely no ne would argue that this is a reflection of
reality; women captives were undoubtedly raped, and there was probably no wholesale killing
of female captives” (Consent and Coercion, 209–210), though she later concludes “What is
particularly interesting for our purposes is that the only alternative to rape that the poet
envisages is the death of the woman” (Consent and Coercion, 210).
45
A point echoed by Laiou: “The consent of the girl does not play a role, either in the
original action or, explicitly, in the eventual resolution. It is only after her marriage that she
is said to love the emir, and this, in a sense, is her consent after the fact” (Consent and
Coercion, 210).
systematic disenfranchisement of women in the romance and abnegates

their subjectivity in the borderlands.”46
The Emir as predator is emphasized throughout the “Lay of the Emir”
through the repeated use of zoomorphic metaphors that characterize him
in these terms. For instance, after he and the girl marry, he decides to
return home to help his mother, since his conversion back to Christianity
has put her, a Saracen, at risk. The Emir’s plan to run off with the girl
comes to one of her brothers in a dream, and he recounts it to the others:
«Ἤμην καθήμενος,» φησίν, «ἐπάνω ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ,

καὶ ἱέρακας ἔβλεπτον ἐπὶ τὴν Λακκοπέτραν
καὶ φάλκωνα πολεμικὸν διώκων περιστέραν·
ὡς δὲ ταύτην ἐδίωκε καὶ τελείωσιν εἶχεν,
ἀμφότεροι εἰσήλθοσαν ἔνδον τοῦ κουβουκλίου,
ἔνθα διάγει ὁ γαμβρὸς μετὰ τῆς αὐταδέλφης.»
“I was seated,” he said, “up in the house,

and I was watching hawks at Lakkopetra,
and a fierce falcon pursuing a dove.
As he pursued it and neared success,
both came into the chamber
where our brother-in-law lives with our sister.”47
Though the close connection between the Emir as the predatory falcon
and the wife as the preyed-upon dove is fairly obvious from this recitation
of the dream, the eldest brother gives a speech in which he interprets for
his other brothers and, by extension, the audience, the meaning of the
dream and the symbolism of the animals:
Ἱέρακες, ὡς λέγουσιν, ἄνδρες ἅρπαγες εἶναι,

φάλκονα δὲ ὅν ἔβλεπες, φοβοῦμαι τὸν γαμβρόν μας
περιστερὰν τὴν ἀδελφὴν μήπως την ἀδικήση.
Hawks, so they say, stand for abductors,

and as for the falcon whom you saw, I fear that our brother-in-law
might do some harm to the dove, our sister.48
46
47
DA 1.139.
48
DA 2.148. Not knowing that the revelation occurred in a dream, the Emir naturally
suspects his wife of having told her brothers. Laiou notes that “this is the one place where
54 A.J. GOLDWYN
Thus, at the very first moment when the zoomorphic metaphor compar-
ing a lover to a predator and his beloved to prey is articulated, there is also
an explanation given for it, thus offering an interpretation sanctioned by
both the narrator and the characters themselves, which can then serve as
an interpretive paradigm for ensuing uses of this rhetorical figure.
Nor is this language limited exclusively to those observing the behavior
of the Emir. He himself uses this rhetoric when speaking to his wife; upon
reaching his house after an absence, he calls out to her “Περιστερά μου
πάντερπνε, δέξαι τὸ σὸν γεράκιν | καὶ παραμύθησον αὐτὸ ἀπὸ τῆς ξενιτείας”
(My delightful dove, receive your hawk | and comfort him after his exile).49
For the Emir, his characterization as a predatory animal is a proud part of
his own self-definition. It is not just the narrator and audience, but in
some sense the characters themselves as well, including the wife, her broth-
ers, and the Emir, who are aware of the ways in which their behavior (i.e.
hunting) and their rhetoric (i.e. describing themselves as predator and
prey) reflect the construction of individual, romantic, and political identity
through the implied or actualized use of violence. Nor, as the example of
the tortured and slaughtered prisoner girls demonstrates, is this violence
directed exclusively or even principally at animals; the Emir’s hunting sim-
ply distills one manifestation of his general unconcern with subjectivities
and lives other than his own.
From the ecocritical perspective, an analysis of zoomorphic metaphors
about the Emir and his wife suggest the apotheosis of male power: the
Emir is a fierce hunter and killer of wild animals, of enemy soldiers, and,
ultimately, of women as well. The same predatorial strength with which he
rules over human civilization in both love and war is also used to subjugate
the natural environment. Nature, like women and society, becomes one
more site for instrumental patriarchal exploitation.
the consent of the girl is raised, as the emir bitterly berates his wife, telling her that it was her
desire to go with him to Syria, and he did not force her” (Consent and Coercion, 210). He
asks her: “Μή γάρ σε κατήναγκασα, ἤ παρεβίασα σε. | Μάλλον ού με ἠνάγκασας μετ᾽ ἐμοῦ
πορεῦθηναι.” (Surely I didn’t insist or compel you? On the contrary, you insisted that you
should accompany me.) (DA 2.181–182). This, however, begs the question of whether
consent can be legitimately granted or withheld when the larger context in which that con-
sent was given is already shot through with explicit and implicit threats of violence, both in
terms of his abduction of her from her home against her will and through his systematic
murder of non-consenting women.
49
DA 3.265.
The Lover as Hunter in the “Digeneid”

The story of Digenis’ father and mother mirrors the much longer and
more detailed narrative of Digenis’ own courtship while at the same time
retaining the same ideological contours of power, control, and exploita-
tion. Indeed, even before the narrative switches its focus from father to
son, Digenis’ depiction as a predator is already under way. The father
comes during the course of his adventures to an uninhabited pass in the
wilderness where a lion scares off all his retainers. But the Emir, a predator
more powerful than the lion, kills the animal easily, then tells his men:
Τοὺς ὀδόντας ἐκσπάσατε πάντας τοὺς τοῦ θηρίου,

ὡσαύτος καὶ τοὺς ὄνυχας τῆς δεξίας χειρός του
ἵνα, ὁπότε σὺν θεῷ στραφῶ εἰς Ρωμανίαν,
φορέσωμεν αὐτούς, φημί, τὸν πάγκαλον υἱόν μου,
τὸν Διγενῆ Ἀκρίτην τὸν γενναῖον.
Pull out all the beast’s teeth,

and also the claws of its right paw,
so that, when with God’s help I return to Roman territory,
we may give them to wear, I say, to my very handsome son,
Digenis Akritis, the Cappadocian of double-descent, the noble
Frontiersman.50
Digenis’ zoomorphic transformation begins before he is even properly

introduced in his own story. The Emir’s soldiers all flee, thus marking the
Emir as the bravest and most powerful among the men; he then over-
comes the lion, marking him as superior in ferocity and martial prowess to
even the most ferocious and powerful non-human animal. This also marks
him as the true heir to hold political power as well, as the lion was one of
the iconographic symbols of the Byzantine imperial power, and was used
in particular to depict the emperor as the defender of the borders.51
Digenis, then, the son of a man stronger than a lion, becomes, like his
50
DA 3.101.
51
For which, see Schmidt: “Obviously a predator himself, [the emperor] nevertheless
appears as the protector of the border between Byzantine civilization and wild nature out-
side” (“Protective and Fierce,” 167). For Digenis as a lion guarding the border from thieves,
see his battle against the frontier guerillas Philopappous, Kinnamos, and Ioannakis, in which
“they fled before me as if from a lion” (6.240) and, later, Kinnamos thought “that he would
terrify the lion” (DA 6.257). The general tone of this combat, in which the participants are
56 A.J. GOLDWYN
father riding into battle, a chimeric creature, part man, part lion, as he
incorporates the lion’s predatory physical attributes, its teeth and claws,
onto his own human body.52 In this, he is similar to Emelye, who, in wear-
ing a garland, becomes the hybrid human–flower that marks her sexual
desirability. Digenis, too, the hybrid human–lion, is marked as the warrior
he is destined to become. Indeed, upon seeing his baby child for the first
time after returning after a long absence,
τοιαῦτα ἀπεφθέγγετο ἐκ βάθους τῆς καρδίας

«Πότε, γεράκιν μου καλόν, τὰς πτέρυγας ἁπλώσεις
καὶ κυνηγήσεις πέρδικα, λῃστάδας ὑποτάχεις;»
he pronounced these words from the depths of his heart:

“When will you spread your wings my fine hawk,
and hunt partridges and lay brigands low?”53
It is his father’s deepest wish that his son become the chimeric predator
that he himself is: the human–hawk hybrid that hunts and kills men and
animals and, through the well-established link between women and par-
tridges (and other kinds of prey birds), a hunter of women. Given this
kind of upbringing, it comes as no surprise that the young Digenis is eager
to begin hunting. Ironically and despite his initial wish, it is the Emir who
is initially unwilling to let his son go hunting because, at twelve years of
age, he is too young, but Digenis insists:
Εἰ μετὰ τὴν τελείωσιν ἀνδραγαθήσω, πάτερ,

τί μοι ἐκ τούτου ὄφελος; Τούτο πάντες ποιοῦσιν.
Ἄρτι ποθῶ δοξάσασθαι καὶ τὸ γένος λαμπρῦναι.
If I do valiant deeds after I have reached manhood, father,

what benefit do I gain from that? This is what everyone does.
It is now that I want to achieve renown and to shed lustre on my family.54
described as wolves, dogs, and sheep in addition to Digenis as the lion, is perhaps the closest
analog to the scene in The Knight’s Tale.
52
The lion skin also is no doubt meant to equate Digenis with Herakles, the other great
hunter who wore a lion skin.
53
DA 3.306–308.
54
DA 4.94–96.
Digenis, like his father, is clear about his instrumental use of animals: their
lives (via their deaths) have no innate worth, no subjectivity; rather, they
exist only to help him achieve glory and demonstrate his manhood. The
connection is made even more explicit in the Escorial manuscript, in which
Digenis says to his father:
Ὡς πότε θέλω κυνηγᾶν λαγούδια καὶ περδίκια;

Αὐτὰ τῶν χωριατῶν εἰσίν, τοῦ κυνηγᾶν περδίκια,
ἄρχοντες δὲ νεώτεροι καὶ εὐγενῶν παιδία
λέοντας καὶ ἄρκους κυνηγοῦν καὶ ἄλλα δεινὰ θηρία.
How long shall I be hunting hares and partridges?

Hunting partridges is what peasants do,
but young lords and the sons of the high-born
hunt lions and bears and other fierce beasts.55
Digenis thinks of hunting not only in terms of his manhood, but also in
terms of social class. Hunting is thus a signifier invested with three aspects
of his identity: as a man (as opposed to a woman), as a man (as opposed to
a boy), and as a member of the elite.
That this is learned behavior representative of Digenis’ larger social
milieu is further evidenced by the way in which he kills his prey. Upon see-
ing his first prey (a family of bears), Digenis’ uncle tells him: “ἄρκτους οὐκ
ἔνι ἐπαινετὸν πολεμεῖν μετὰ ξίφους” (there is no glory in fighting bears
with swords), thus reiterating the relationship between killing animals and
earning prestige.56 And Digenis, indeed, stuns his hunting companions by
disrobing and disarming himself save for a “λιτὸν ῥαβδίτζιν” (simple
stick).57 Digenis thus adopts a more animalistic or natural way of hunting
devoid of both the clothing and the weaponry that separates the human
from the animal. Digenis’ animalistic nature is further emphasized when
he actually engages the bear:
ἐκεῖνος ὤν ἀπείραστος εἰς θηριομαχίαν

ούκ ἐγυρίσθη ὄπισθεν νὰ τοῦ δώσῃ ῥαβδέαν
ἀλλ᾽ἐπεσέβη σύντομα, ἐκ τὴν μέσην τὸ πιάνει
55
E 744–747. All citations are from G unless noted.
56
DA 4.111.
57
DA 4.119.
58 A.J. GOLDWYN
καὶ σφίγξας τοὺς βραχίονας εὐθὺς ἀπένπνιξέ τον

καὶ τὰ ἐντὸς ἐξήρχετο ἐκ τοῦ στόματος τούτου.
He, lacking experience in fighting wild beasts,

did not turn around to strike it with his stick
but rushed up quickly and seized it round the waist
and, tightening his grasp, immediately throttled it,
and its innards came out through its mouth.58
Like an animal, Digenis has no formal training or experience in the hunt;

rather, he relies on instinct and his own superior physical power: he does
not even use the primitive human weapon of the stick, but rather, like a
wild animal, kills the bear with only his own strength.
In the ensuing passage, Digenis continues his hunt, and the figurative
language used in a string of remarkable similes describing his pursuit of his
prey characterizes him, again like his father, as a chimeric being composed
of the most distinctive parts of the most dangerous predators. When chas-
ing the male bear whose mate he has just killed, Digenis “πετάσας ὡς
ἀετὸς” (flew like an eagle); when he subsequently sees a deer, “ὥσπερ
πάρδος ἐξέβη” (he rushed out like a leopard) on “Ὧ πόδες ὡραιότατοι,
ἐφάμιλλοι πτερύγον” (most beautiful feet, the equal of wings).59 The chi-
meric predator—part human, part eagle, part leopard—that Digenis has
become is manifested physically upon his hybrid body.
This practice of killing animals as a means of glorifying humans and
justifying their political power is not limited to the characters themselves;
at crucial moments in the text, the author interjects to offer moralizing
commentary on the scene. After narrating the first part of the hunt, for
instance, he says:
Τίς μὴ θαυμάσῃ μέγεθος Θεοῦ τῶν χαρισμάτων

καὶ τὴν αὐτοῦ ἀσύγκριτον δύναμιν μεγαλύνῃ;
Ὄντος ἔργον παράδοξον τὰς ἐννοίας ἐκπλήττον,
πῶς τὴν ἔλαφον ἔφθασε παιδίον χωρὶς ἵππου,
πῶς τοῦς ἄρκτους ἐφόνευσε μηδὲν ἐν χερσὶν ἔχον,
ὄντως Θεοῦ τὸ δώρημα καὶ δεξιᾶς ὑψίστου.
58
DA 4.124.
59
DA 4.132; 142; 152.
Who would not marvel at the greatness of God’s blessings

and who would not praise his incomparable might?
Truly it was an extraordinary deed that confounds the understanding,
how the boy caught up with the deer without a horse,
how he slew the bears with nothing in his hands,
truly a gift from God and from the right hand of the Highest.60
The author’s opening rhetorical question suggests the hegemony of ani-

mal exploitation ideology: it is espoused not just by Digenis, his father, and
his uncle, but also by the narrator himself, who affirms that killing animals
for these reasons is not only acceptable to God, but is indeed a divine gift.
A variation on this scene is repeated later when Digenis is formally pro-
moted to become ruler of the borderlands by the Byzantine emperor. The
emperor concludes his speech giving Digenis the promotion by offering
him whatever gifts he asks for. Digenis tells the emperor to keep all his
material wealth for himself, and instead asks the emperor:
ἀγαπᾶν τὸ ὑπήκοον, ἐλεεῖν πενομένους,

ἐξ ἀδικούντων ῥύεσθαι τοὺς καταπονουμένος,
[…]
Ταῦτα γάρ, δέσποτα, εἰσὶν ὅπλα δικαιοσύνης,
μεθ’ ὧν δυνήσῃ τῶν ἐχθρῶν πάντων περιγενέσθαι.
οὐ γὰρ ἔστι δυνάμεως κρατεῖν καὶ βασιλεύειν,
Θεοῦ μόνον τὸ δώρημα καὶ δεξιᾶς ὑψίστου.
to love his subjects, to pity the needy,

to rescue the oppressed from wrong-doers
[…]
These, emperor, are the weapons of justice
with which you will be able to get the better of your enemies;
for to govern and rule as emperor is not the result of strength
but is a gift from God alone and right hand of the Most High.61
Immediately following this speech, Digenis orders his men to bring an

untamed horse “σιδήροις δεδεμένον” (bound with iron)62 and let it run free,
so that Digenis can demonstrate his speed. The issue of animal subjectivity
is not part of Digenis’ worldview, at least insofar as Digenis neither shows it
pity nor rescues it from oppressors, as he claimed above. Indeed, the animal
60
DA 4.146–151.
61
DA 4.1033–1034; 1038–1041.
62
DA 4.1056.
60 A.J. GOLDWYN
very clearly expresses its lack of consent with regard to its treatment, for it
first tries to run away and then, when Digenis captures it, the horse begins
“λακτίζων στρηνιάζων <τε>, φυγεῖν ὅλως εἰκαζων” (kicking and struggling,
altogether looking like getting away), and rightly so, for then Digenis “κάτω
τον ἐκατέρραξεν εἰς γῆν ἐφηπλωμένον | καὶ πάντες ἐξεπλάγησαν τῇ πᾶραδόξῳ
θέα” (flung the horse down so that it sprawled over the ground and every-
one was astonished at the extraordinary sight).63 By chance, a lion then
appears; Digenis kills it and then “πρὸς βασιλέα ἤνεγκε «Δέξαι,» λέγων, «
κυνῆγιν | τοῦ σοῦ οίκέτου, δέσποτα, διὰ σοῦ θηρεύθεντα»” (he took it to the
emperor, “Accept,” he said, | “your servant’s prey, lord, hunted for you”).64
As his father had built his political legitimacy through sport hunting of tro-
phy animals, and as Digenis convinced his father of his own maturity
through more killing of lions and bears, so too does Digenis demonstrate to
the emperor the wisdom of his promotion.
Perhaps most importantly in the context of the romance, this animal-
killing power marks him as the most worthy lover, deserving of the most
worthy beloved and, from a structuralist perspective, therefore, it is fitting
that he meets his future wife, a different kind of (romantic) prey, on the
ride home from that first hunt. Before they meet, however, the party
retreats to a spring where Digenis washes off the blood, gore, and sweat
that he, in his wild and predatorial state, had accrued and once again
assumes the raiment of a civilized Byzantine lord.65 In an elaborate ekph-
rasis, his clothes, his horse, and his gear are described in rich and descrip-
tive terms.66 The move from bloodstained hunter to well-dressed nobleman
changes his external appearance but does not change his fundamental
character; still a predator, he simply shifts from being the literal hunter of
animals to the figurative hunter of women.
Indeed, on the way home, he sees a beautiful girl and, after a brief
courtship, they take oaths of loyalty to one another in terms reminiscent
of those used to describe his father and mother:
ἡ παρθένος προκύψασα ἐκ τὴν χρυσῆν θυρίδα,

ὁ παῖς τὴν ὑπεδέξατο ὀρθωθεὶς ἐν τῷ ἵππῷ.
ἡ πέρδικα ἐξεπέτασεν, ὁ ἰέραξ τὴν ἐδέχθη.
63
DA 4.1062; 1064–1065.
64
DA 4.1075–1076.
65
DA 4.206–207.
66
DA 4.232–253.
The girl leaned out of the golden window,

the boy raised himself upright on his horse and took her:
the partridge had flown away, the hawk had taken her.67
Like his father, Digenis is the consummate hunter, hunting both prey ani-
mals in the wild and the object of his love in human society, and his tri-
umph is rendered in the metaphorical language of the hawk and the
partridge, the same language in which his father courted his mother.68
Scholars have long recognized the hunting of predators as the generic
prerequisite for the hunting of women; referring to the girl as Digenis’
“quarry,” for instance, Beaton writes that “the logic of the text requires
Digenis to begin his wooing on the return journey from the hunt that has
proved his manhood.”69 Or, more pointedly, in the words of Eliso
Elizbarashvili, “the first hunt of Digenes [sic] becomes a proof of the
hero’s right to claim the most beautiful woman in the region.”70
Masculinity is thus constructed at the expense of animal lives and female
sexual agency. As the most powerful man, this virile masculinity also marks
him as deserving of certain sexual privileges as well: to quote the title of
Peter Mackridge’s article on the subject, “None but the brave deserve the
67
DA 4.585.
68
Nor is such language limited to Digenis and his kin, nor even to male speakers. Later in
the story, when Digenis and his wife move to the borders, a group of raiders seek the help of
the Amazon Maximou to kill Digenis and take the girl from him; Maximou says that the
raider Philopappous has “κυνῆγιν εὖρε κάλλιστον ἀρτίως εἰς τὰς ἄκρας” (just now found the
loveliest prey on the frontiers) (DA 6.431). Later, Philopappous tells her that they must
sneak up quietly on Digenis and the girl so they cannot escape and “καὶ οὐδ’ ὅλως ἰσχύσωμεν
τὸ θήραμα κρατῆσαι” (we shall have no chance of catching our prey) (DA 6.462). These
statements make rather literal the predator–prey metaphor used by Digenis and his family
here.
69
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 41. See also Ricks, for whom, in the E version, “the
highest, and most rewarding, deed of valour, however, is not the hunting of wild game but
the hunting of women; and the former is, ideally, but an appetizer for the latter” (“The
Pleasure of the Chase,” 290). Ricks later adds that in “G, which is rightly to be considered a
romance […] the hunting motif has all but disappeared,” a statement that I hope this analysis
proves is not sustained by the text (“The Pleasure of the Chase,” 293).
70
Elizbarashvili, “The Formation of a Hero,” 445. The marriage as a whole and the social
and legal circumstances surrounding their courtship and marriage are discussed in Angold,
Church and Society, 396–402. For early Byzantine marriage laws on abduction and marriage
that discusses the historical background to Digenis but not the poem itself, see Evans-
Grubbs, “Abduction Marriage in Antiquity.”
62 A.J. GOLDWYN
fair.”71 Both father and son deny non-coercive models of female sexual
agency; instead, their explicit demonstration of violence towards animals
and non-consenting women reinforces their ideological refusal to consider
issues surrounding consent at all.
Before Digenis has even seen the girl, he asks his father to send mes-
sages to her father imploring him to agree to their marriage:
καὶ εἰ μὲν ἴσως ἀρεσθῇ γαμβρὸν νά με ἐπάρῃ,

ἵνα τὸν ἔχω πενερὸν τῇ ἰδίᾳ του γνώμῃ.
εἰ δὲ μή, γνώσῃ, πάτερ μου, μετὰ ταῦτα τὸ τέλος.
so that if perhaps it pleases him to take me as a son-in-law,

I may have him as my father-in-law of his own volition;
but if not, my father, you will discover the consequences later.72
Digenis here demonstrates a rather limited conception of consent, as he

ignores the girl’s agency entirely, and only offers the father the choice of
consent or violence. When first he meets the girl, however, he indeed asks
for her consent in person:
Γνώρισόν μοι, κοράσιον, εἰ ἔχεις με εἰς νοῦν σου

καὶ εἰ ποθεῖς κατὰ πολὺ τοῦ λαβεῖν σε γυναῖκα.
εἰ δ’ ἀλλαχοῦ ἔχεις τὸν νοῦν, πολλὰ οὐ παρακαλῶ σε.
Let me know, girl, if you have me in your mind,

and if you desire very much that I should take you as my wife;
if you have your mind elsewhere, I shall not importune you.73
This initial performative request for consent is later belied by the threat of
violence that underpins all of Digenis’ interactions, whether with men,
71
Mackridge, “None but the brave deserve the fair.”
72
DA 4.305–308. Laiou suggests that, since Digenis’ father had already asked for permis-
sion and been denied, “Everyone is behaving properly, except the girl’s father” (Consent and
Coercion, 201). Such a reading, however, does not account for the narratological complexity
of the scene: the narrative, told exclusively from the perspective of Digenis (and the Emir),
can’t account for what the girl has said to her father or what the father’s own reasons might
be. Thus narratology is important for understanding both what has been said and what has
not, as well as who is or is not telling the story. Surely it’s not entirely unreasonable of a
father not to want to marry his daughter to such a family as this, and Digenis’ future adulter-
ous affairs and rapes suggest the father may not have been wrong.
73
DA 4.316–318.
women, or non-human animals. Fearing that the girl has changed her
mind, he tells her:
Εἰ δ’ ἴσως ἐμετέγνωσας, ἑτέρου ᾑρετίσω

καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ἀφορμὰς προβάλλεσαι τοιαύτας,
μὰ τοὺς ἁγίους μάρτυρα τοῦ Χριστοῦ Θεοδώρους,
οὐκ ἄν ἄλλος ζῶντος ἐμου εἰσακουσθῇ ἀνήρ σου.
If perhaps you have changed your mind and have chosen another
and because of this are putting forward excuses such as these
by the Saints Theodore, the holy martyrs of Christ,
no one else while I am alive shall be called your husband.74
His explicit threat to murder any other potential husband—either one

with whom she might have an arranged marriage or one whom she might
actually love—would also have significant consequences for her, as the
economic and political lives of women were heavily dependent on men. It
is, therefore, a threat not only to any future husband’s life, but to her own
future economic security and happiness as well.
Despite Digenis’ magnanimous speech to the emperor outlining his
ideals about the proper exercise of power, his model of governance is one
of coercive force. Digenis may give rhetorical support to the need to pro-
tect the poor and liberate the oppressed, but his actions demonstrate that
these categories, to him, exclude the non-Byzantine inhabitants of the
cities he conquers, women generally (and particularly women with whom
he wants to have sex, consensual or otherwise), and animals. An ecocritical
analysis of zoomorphic metaphors and Digenis as hunter thus shows the
intersection of ecocritical, feminist, and postcolonial critiques of power,
for animals, women, and conquered peoples are subject to patriarchal vio-
lence and, though needy and oppressed, fall outside the community that
Digenis has sworn to protect, which must then consist primarily of elite
Byzantine males.
These threads all come together in his treatment of Maximou, a warrior
woman whom he encounters while protecting his wife from abduction on
the banks of the Euphrates. He gives lots of speeches about protecting
women, has sex with her in a context that complicates notions of freely
74
DA 4.475–477.
64 A.J. GOLDWYN
given consent, then kills her in order to relieve his internal guilt about
violating his marriage vows.
The Lover as Gardener in Digenis Akritis

Though Digenis’ pursuit of his future bride is presented in the text as
analogous to a zoomorphic predator–prey model, the rhetoric of his
courtship is rendered with a different sort of natural metaphor entirely:
the predator becomes the gardener; he has captured his wild prey and now
he must, to mix metaphors, turn to its proper cultivation. Thus, the antho-
morphic complements the zoomorphic, a connection identified by Charles
Barber: “The pleasure taken in both garden and girl is bound together, so
that the two might not be separated. [… T]he body of the heroine
becomes the garden itself. And as a garden the body of the woman
becomes subject to the male gardener’s gaze.”75 For Barber then, “such
treatment of the heroine as the garden and of the attendant male as the
gardener” is a central feature of the romances, one of the ways in which
“the gardener acts as a controlling figure [who] curbs unruly nature”
while his beloved “within the garden […] is to be cultivated as the plants
are. She is made to be fruitful.”76
Book 4, which describes Digenis and his beloved’s courtship, for exam-
ple, begins with the following description of passion:
ῥίζα γὰρ οὗτος καὶ ἀρχὴ καθέστηκεν ἀγάπης,

ἐξ ἧς φιλία τίκτεται, εἶτα γεννᾶται πόθος,
ὃς αὐξηθεὶς κατὰ μικρὸν φέρει καρπὸν τοιοῦτον,
μερίμνας μὲν διηνεκεῖς, ἐννοίας καὶ φροντίδας.
For this is established as the root and beginning of love,

from which affection is begotten, then desire is born,
which as it increases gradually bears such fruit
as constant anxieties, worries and concerns.77
Here, the narrator spins a double metaphor of passion as a tree and as a

union for procreation: as a tree, it has roots and bears fruit; as a union, it
begets and gives birth. In this double metaphor, then, the metaphor of
75
Barber, “Reading the Garden,” 16.
76
Barber, “Reading the Garden,” 16.
77
DA 4.5–8.
lovers as grafted trees can be seen. Love, women, marriage, and children
are all plants that must be carefully tended by the male gardener.
Indeed, during their courtship, Digenis uses this horticultural language
to describe his relationship with his beloved. Fearing the girl has forgotten
him, he goes to her at night and sings her a song:
Πῶς ἐπελάθου, πάντερπινε, νέας ἡμων ἀγάπης

καὶ ἡδέως καθύπνωσας ἀμερίμνως, εὐκόλως;
Ἀνάστα, ῥόδον πάντερπνον, μῆλον μεμυρισμένον.
ὁ αὐγερινὸς ἀνέτειλεν, δεῦρο ἄς περιπατῶμεν.
How, my most delightful girl, could you forget our new love
and sleep sweetly without a care and contentedly?
Rise up, my most delightful rose and perfumed apple.
The morning star has risen, come, let us stroll for a while.78
He describes her as a rose and an apple, and she, in turn, responds to him
by employing the same kind of metaphor. Reassuring him of her love, she
also uses anthomorphic language: “Ὁ Θεὸς γὰρ ἐπίσταται ὁ τῶν κρυφίων
γνώστης, | ὅτι ἐρριζώθη ὁ πόθος σου εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν καρδίαν” (For God who
is aware of secrets knows | that desire for you is rooted in my heart).79 In
her response to him, she suggests that he is a successful gardener: he has
planted a seed that has taken root in her. Some short while later, more-
over, he continues their verbal game of increasing metaphorical sophistica-
tion by repeating her previous metaphor and then adding a new element
to it. Since the moment they saw each other, he tells her, “οὐκ ἀπέστης ἐκ
τὴν ἐμὴν ψυχὴν ὡρίτζαν μίαν. | ἐρριζώθης γὰρ ἔσωθεν καὶ συνεπλέχθης
ταύτῃ” (you have not been absent from my soul for one moment. | For
you are rooted within me and entwined there).80 As she said that he was
rooted in her, so too does he say that she is rooted in him, yet he adds that
she is “entwined there,” thus offering the first example of the grafted tree,
one of the most potent metaphors for describing love in the medieval
Greek romance and one with a long tradition in ancient and medieval lit-
erature more generally.
78
DA 4.432–435. He refers to her in similar terms again later, calling her “ἄνθος
γλυκύτατον, ῥόδον μεμυρισμένον” (my sweetest flower, perfumed rose) (DA 4.766).
79
DA 4.444–445.
80
DA 4.542–543.
66 A.J. GOLDWYN
Having successfully hunted and captured his prey, and having success-
fully planted her like a garden and twined himself around her like a grafted
tree, Digenis takes his new bride to the border areas and literally plants her
in a garden:
Καὶ δὴ πρός τινα θαυμαστὸν λειμῶνα ἀπελθόντες,

ἐκεῖ τὴν τένδαν ἔστησα καὶ τὴν ἰδίαν κλίνην
κύκλωθεν ταύτης τεθεικὼς πάντων φυτῶν τὰ ἔιδη,
And after we had arrived at a marvelous meadow,

I put up the tent there and my own couch,
setting all sorts of plants around it.81
Among the vegetation he plants and the domesticated and decorative

birds with which he stocks the garden (“ταῶνες χειροήθεις τε ψιττακοὶ
καὶ οἱ κύκνοι” [tame peacocks, parrots and swans])82 is his wife. Her
beauty was greater than that of the plants and animals in the garden, he
says (for the narrative is still being told by him in the first person):
Ναρκίσσου γὰρ τὸ πρόσωπον τὴν χροίαν ἐμιμεῖτο,

αἱ παρειαὶ ὡς εὔθαλον ἐξανέτελλον ῥόδον,
ἄνθος ῥόδων ἀρτιφυὲς ὑπέφηνε τὰ χείλη
ὁπηνίκα ταῖς κάλυξιν ἄρχεται ἀνατέλλειν.
For her face mimicked the narcissus’ colour,

her cheeks burgeoned like a blooming rose,
her lips resembled a newly opened rose
when it begins to burst out of its bud.83
As he has been described as a hybrid of different kinds of predatory ani-

mals, so he describes his wife as a hybrid flower: part human, part narcis-
sus, part rose. This description, recalling as it does a conventional way of
speaking about female beauty, also posits him—as a man, a ruler, a hus-
band, and a gardener—as having power over her. She becomes a decorative
object admired only for her beauty, dependent upon him in every other
way.
81
DA 6.15–17.
82
DA 6.22.
83
DA 6.31–34.
Indeed, that she is dependent upon him for her safety is then demon-
strated in the ensuing scene, when Digenis drives off a stranger who enters
the garden and attempts to rape her. This intruder is “δράκων μορφώσας
ἑαυτὸν εἰς εὐειδὲς παιδίον” (a serpent, who had transformed himself into
a good-looking boy),84 yet another of the human–animal hybrids present
in the poem. And yet, this hybrid is threatening, as snakes in lovers’ gar-
dens have been since Eden. Unlike his biblical ancestors, however, Digenis
simply cuts off the snake’s head. But Digenis can hardly relax, for scarcely
has he killed the boy-turned-serpent than the girl is attacked by a (regular)
lion that jumps out of the grove, which he promptly kills as well.
The central premise of ecofeminist discourse is that the same forces that
oppress the environment are also those that oppress women, and the
events in the garden demonstrate the applicability of this assertion. Given
the zoo- and anthomorphic characterizations of Digenis, his wife, and the
good-looking boy, the power hierarchy becomes clear: the snake (and later
the lion) is an intruder in the garden and it is the gardener’s job to protect
his plants from such intrusions, just as it is the emperor’s job to protect his
political power with force and it is the husband’s job to guard the sexual
and emotional agency of his wife. As the serpent is a threat to the garden,
so too are other men threats to his political and sexual supremacy.
The beloved as prey animal is a fitting metaphor for the moment of
amorous conquest, but because it is an instantaneous moment, it is less
suited to depicting the long-term nature of marriage. For this, the culti-
vated garden is more apt, as this is something that can grow and be
improved on over time. Thus, Digenis switches from hunter to gardener
and his bride switches from prey animal to flower. The garden metaphor is
particularly important too because it implies proper horticultural tech-
nique, that is, by analogy, proper behavior towards one’s wife, for without
proper gardening, the plants can suffer.85 Thus, while the successful
84
DA 6.47.
85
Such a connection is noted in passing by Anthony Littlewood, who notes that “the gar-
dens show a much closer connexion with the heroine than with the hero. All the romances,
with the exceptions of Daphnis and Chloë and Digenis Akritas, which are both sui generis,
possess a garden (or gardens) belonging to the house or castle in which she lives or is impris-
oned (or, in the case of Niketas’ homeless heroine [i.e. Drosilla], temporally serving in lieu of
an abode). Moreover, the garden is usually described upon or very close to our, and the hero’s,
first acquaintance with the heroine, while her formal ekphrasis tends to follow the garden’s,
the link between them being emphasized by interlocking imagery” (Littlewood, “Romantic
Paradises,” 98). Littlewood thus proposes an ecofeminist before ecofeminism reading of the
68 A.J. GOLDWYN
relationship is depicted as a flowering garden, the failed relationship is

depicted as its opposite.
In Digenis, the metaphor of the rejected beloved as dying plant is
inseparable from the same issues of consent that marked the predator–
prey model of lovers. As previously described, Book 4 closes with Digenis’
promotion to governor of the frontier and his speech on the importance
of protecting the needy and the oppressed. Book 5 then opens with
Digenis on patrol in the borderlands, and in particular how he “ἀμελῶς
περιπέπτωκεν ἐγκλήματι μοιχείας” (fell carelessly into the crime of
adultery)86 when he comes across an Arab girl who has been betrayed and
abandoned by her Greek husband.87 The girl begs Digenis to find the
husband and bring him back to her, bewailing her fate in dendromorphic
terms:
Οἴμοι, οἴμοι, παντάλαινα καὶ παναθλία τύχη,

ἡ ἀδοκήτως ἀγαθοῦ τοιούτου στερηθεῖσα,
ἡ τὸ γλυκὺ πρὸ τοῦ πιεῖν ἀπολέσασα κάλλος,
καὶ ὡς δένδρον νεόφητον πρὸ καιροῦ ξηρανθεῖσα.
Alas, alas, most wretched and most miserable fate,

to be deprived unexpectedly of such a benefit,
to have lost sweet beauty before drinking it,
and to have withered before my time like a newly planted tree.88
Married life is a long, slow process of growth and development, the main
function of which is procreation—thus the appeal of the metaphor of gar-
dening, the main function of which is similarly the production of a new
generation of plants. But marriage can also end abruptly if the husband, in
this case the gardener, does not treat his wife, in this case the plants, prop-
erly. Thus, the girl describes herself as a newly planted tree, that is, a new
bride, which has withered from lack of proper attention from the husband.
This, in conjunction with the previous gardening metaphor, suggests the
possible outcomes of marriage. Digenis, the proper gardener, leads his
connection between women and gardens, though he incorrectly excludes Digenis from the
pattern he correctly identifies in the rest of the tradition.
86
DA 5.14.
87
The sexual power dynamics in this passage are discussed in Laiou, Consent and Coercion,
213–215.
88
DA 5.173–176.
wife to a verdant garden in Book 6, while the abandoned wife in Book 5

is a wilted tree in the desert. With regard to gendered power dynamics,
however, agency resides in both cases with the gardener, that is, the man;
the abandoned bride is as powerless with regards to her own self-
actualization and continued growth as the well-tended bride. First, she
relies on the husband who abandons her, and then she must rely on
Digenis to restore her to that same husband.
The problem for women in both cases is the same: they remain at the
mercy of the men in their lives, who prove sometimes malevolent and
sometimes beneficent. In neither instance, however, are they invested in
the subjectivity of the women themselves, a subjectivity of which sexual
consent is the most visible manifestation. Given his instrumental use of
Greek women and animals previously, it is perhaps an ecofeminist inevita-
bility that Digenis shows no more regard for that of the non-Greek indig-
enous women he encounters on the border. In his own words, Digenis
recounts his conversation with her:
Ταῦτα, φίλε, ὡς ἤκουσα ἐκ στόματος τῆς κόρης,

καθάπερ φλὸξ εἰς τῆν ἐμὴν καρδίαν ἐπεισῆλθεν
καὶ προσέφερεν ἔρωτα καὶ παράνομον μίξιν.
[…]
ἠρξαμην ἄπαντα ποιεῖν πράξεως παρανόμου.
[…]
εἰ καὶ πολλὰ ἀνθίστατο ἡ κόρη πρὸς τὸ ἔργον.
When I heard this from the girl’s mouth

it was as if a flame entered my heart
and aroused passion and illegal intercourse.
[…]
I began to do everything that was unlawful
[…]
even if the girl resisted the act vigorously.89
She begged for his protection, but he, in line with his indifference to any
sense of subjectivity of those over whom he has power, rapes her anyway.90
89
DA 5.231–233; 245; 249.
90
Commenting on the passage, Laiou notes that “this rape is presented with a certain
equanimity, which, however, is not difficult to understand. The girl was, after all, a foreigner,
although she had converted to Christianity. Much more important, she was no longer a vir-
gin and, moreover, she had already transgressed all sorts of boundaries for love: she had
70 A.J. GOLDWYN
This, of course, stands in contrast to his Greek wife, towards whom,

though he did capture her and run away, he at least performed an interest
in seeking her consent. It is important to note, however, that in introduc-
ing this scene at the beginning of Book 5, the narrator refers to Digenis’
sin as “μοιχείας” (adultery), and that, when Digenis narrates the story in
the first person, he chooses the same word, which Jeffreys translates as
“illegal intercourse.” This demonstrates just what the sin is, and thus the
ideology of who does and doesn’t merit their own subjectivity. By calling
the sin adultery instead of rape, he makes himself (or perhaps his own wife)
the direct victim of his action; at no time does Digenis consider the conse-
quences of his actions on the defenseless and non-consenting Arab girl.
Digenis then takes the girl back to her husband, threatening him with
death should he abandon her again.91 While on the journey back, how-
ever, Digenis recounts how “γνωστὸν δὲ πᾶσιν ἔφηνα καὶ παράνομον μάλα”
([I] told everyone about him [the husband] and especially that he was a
law-breaker).92 Even as he denounces the husband’s lawlessness, however,
“τὰ δὲ μὴ δέον ἐξειπεῖν παρέτρεχον τῷ λόγῳ” (I passed over in my story
what should not be told).93 Leaving aside the hypocrisy of trumpeting the
sins of another while concealing his own sins, Digenis either doesn’t want
to tell about the rape and uses the excuse of not angering the husband as
cover, or he truly doesn’t think he has done anything wrong to the Arab
girl at all. The second option seems more likely, as Book 5 closes with
Digenis feeling guilty upon seeing his wife, “ὡς αἰσχυνόμενος αὐτὴν
μεγάλως ἀδικήσας” (since I was ashamed of having greatly wronged her),
an emotion he never feels with regard to the Arab girl he raped.94 Digenis
is concerned that men with less power than himself, and of course all
women, be compelled, through threat of violence, to adhere to strictly
normative rules about sex—rules, however, that do not apply to him.
Digenis’ second act of adultery demonstrates just how exempt he is
both in fact and in his own mind from the rules that constrain human
abandoned her parents’ home and even her feminine dress” (Consent and Coercion, 214).
Because of her marginal status and her past behavior, Laiou argues, this is “no rape at all,
then, either in law, which spoke only of the rape of a virgin, or insofar as the twelfth-century
canonists were concerned. The act remained, however, both illegal and a sin” (Consent and
Coercion, 214–215). Digenis rights the illegal act by forcing the girl and her husband back
together, and rights the sin through repentance.
91
DA 5.266–270.
92
DA 5.263.
93
DA 5.274.
94
DA 5.286.
sexuality. While patrolling the border, he does battle with a woman named
Maximou, whom he subsequently defeats, at which point she leaps up in
tears and says:
[…] ‘Ἐλέησον,’ ἐβόα,

‘ἐλέησον με, κύριε, τὴν κακῶς πλανθεῖσαν.
μᾶλλον, εἰ οὐκ ἀπαξιοῖς, ποιήσωμεν φιλίαν,
ἔτι παρθένος γὰρ εἰμὶ ὑπ’ οὐδενὸς φθαρεῖσα.
[…] Have mercy on me,

have mercy, lord, for I have erred greatly.
Or rather, if you do not think it beneath you, let us make a pact,
for I am still a virgin, not violated by any man.95
In her notes on this passage, Elizabeth Jeffreys comments that “Maximou,

having been defeated in her substitute role, returns to the feminine cat-
egory and becomes seductive” and that “Maximou has just proposed
marriage.”96 However, in light of what Maximou must know about
Digenis and about elite male culture generally with regard to its treat-
ment of female prisoners as sex slaves (exemplified by the ravine full of
the mutilated corpses of the young girls who had refused sexual favors to
the army of Digenis’ father), it is just as likely that she is trying to save
her own life (“have mercy on me”) by offering sexual gratification (“I am
a virgin”). In this context, the parameters of consent become far more
murky.97
Digenis’ response to her entreaty is telling in this regard: “‘Οὐκ
ἀποθνῄσκεις, Μαξιμοῦ,’ πρὸς ἀυτὴν ἄρτι ἔφην, | ‘τὸ δὲ ἔχειν σε γαμετὴν οὐ
δυνατόν μοι ἔσται’” (“You are not going to die, Maximou,” I said to her
then, | “but I cannot take you as my wife”).98 Digenis seems to understand
95
DA 6.765–779.
96
Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, 197.
97
Writing about “Digenes’ defloration of Maximou after defeating her in combat,” Peter
Mackridge equally ignores the role of consent: “the significance of this act is not to illustrate
the hero’s unbridled sexual desire, but is primarily symbolic—it is an indication that Maximou
has submitted symbolically to Digenes’ dominance. […] She has ceased to be an ‘unnatural’,
wild Amazon free of male domination and has been tamed by force into her ‘natural’ cate-
gory as woman” (Mackridge, “None but the Brave,” 157). Such a symbolic reading mini-
mizes the physical and sexual trauma (Maximou, already wounded in battle, is specifically
shown to be washing away blood after sex; Z 3719) Digenis has inflicted on her and negates
the ways in which her subjectivity and consent are denied in the text.
98
DA 6.771–772.
72 A.J. GOLDWYN
full well just what she is offering: sex (via marriage) in exchange for her
life. Digenis is unwilling to marry her, though he does have sex with her.99
The Escorial version is more explicit:
«Εἰ δὲ ἂν ὁρμῆς νὰ πορνευθῆς, ἐγὼ νὰ σοῦ τὸ ποίσω.»

Καὶ ἐπέζευσα τὸν μαῦρον μου καὶ λύω τ’ ἄρματα μου,
καὶ τὸ ἐπεθύμα ἡ Μαχιμοὺ γοργὸν τῆς τὸ ἐποῖκα.
καὶ ἀπείτις τῆς τὸ ἔκαμα τῆς Μαξιμοῦς τῆς κούρβας,
εὐθὺς ἐκαβαλίκευσα καὶ ἐπῆγα εἰς τὸ κοράσιον.
“If you are starting to prostitute yourself, let me do the job for you.”
So I dismounted from my black steed and undid my armour
and quickly did to Maximou what she desired.
And after I had done this to Maximou, the slut,
I immediately mounted and went to the girl.100
Discussing this passage, Laiou writes: “Neither version of the poem con-
dones Digenes’ [sic] actions in this episode, and neither explicitly states
that Maximo [sic], rather than Digenes, was the most culpable. But it does
not take a very sophisticated reader to realize that in the end, the blame
falls primarily on the woman. It is she who declared her intention, honor-
able at first, to be sure. Her desire, or consent, to marry Digenes is taken
to extend to a desire, or consent, to have sex with him.”101 Laiou is correct
in that the blame—as constructed within the text itself if not necessarily in
the minds of all readers—falls primarily on Maximou, yet the question of
Maximou’s consent to sex and marriage is surely constrained by the dire
circumstances in which she finds herself.
Indeed, subsequent events prove Maximou prescient in thinking that
marriage (and, if not marriage, perhaps at least sex) would protect her
from Digenis. When he returns home, he finds his wife suspicious of his
late arrival and he lies to her, telling her that he was delayed not because
he had sex with Maximou, but because he was bandaging her wounds,
thus turning his sin into an act of magnanimity: “διὰ τοῦτο ἐβράδυνα, φῶς
μου μεμυρισμένον, | ἵν’ ὅπως μὴ ὀνειδισθῶ ὡς γυναῖκα φονεύσας” | (And I
am late for that reason, my perfumed light, | so that I should not be
99
The Grottaferrata manuscript has a lacuna “perhaps as a result of censorship,” but in her
edition, Jeffreys fills in the scene with the text from the Z manuscript.
100
E1574–1578.
101
Laiou, Consent and Coercion, 216.
reproached for having killed a woman).102 And even though he had con-
vinced his wife of the lie,
καβαλλικεύω παρευθύς, δῆθεν εἰς τὸ κυνῆγιν,

καὶ ταύτην δὲ καταλαβὼν ἀνηλεῶς ἀνεῖλον,
μοιχείαν, φόνον τότε γὰρ ἐκτελέσας ἀθλιως.
I immediately rode off, as if to hunt,

and caught up with her [Maximou] and pitilessly slew her,
the promiscuous creature, committing a wretched murder.103
Having promised not to kill her, Digenis, who had lied to his wife about
his adultery by claiming he had cured her wounds so she wouldn’t die,
nevertheless returns when there is no further reason to do so except to
alleviate his own shame, and does just that. In his patriarchal view of sexual
normativity, she takes the blame and receives punishment—death—simply
at his whim; unable to alleviate his own sense of shame and anger for what
he has done, he blames the woman—who only had sex with him to save
her own life—and kills her anyway.104
These, then, are they ways in which ecocriticism and other theoretical
concerns can intersect to demonstrate the ideologies that justify patriarchal
control: Digenis is a man who sport hunts animals, who rapes and kills
(often indigenous) women,105 who holds those weaker than himself to a
different set of moral and legal codes, all the while lying about it and dis-
pensing justice through violence as he sees fit. In his analysis of animal
studies, Karl Steel argues that “differential allocations of care” are crucial
for determining what distinguishes humans from animals,106 but an inter-
disciplinary perspective can reveal that it is not simply animals to whom this
idea can apply: from a postcolonial perspective, the colonized lie outside
the community of care of the colonizer; from the gendered perspective,
102
DA 6.790–791.
103
DA 6.796–798.
104
Laiou cautions that Maximou’s story cannot “be taken as representing what people
actually did; but [it is a] powerful indicator[] as to the attitudes that suffused the legal sys-
tem, especially in the implementation of the law, and influenced profoundly the lives of the
people” (Consent and Coercion, 217).
105
Though not in the G version, “In some of the folk songs the dying Digenes and his wife
talk about the possibility of her remarrying […]; in most variants he kills his wife so that she
cannot marry his rival” (Mackridge, “None but the Brave,” 155).
106
Steel, How to Make a Human, 14.
74 A.J. GOLDWYN
it can be shown that women lie outside the community of care of men;
from the Marxist or economic perspective, that the poor lie outside the
community of care of the elite.107
And yet, given that ecocriticism is concerned with both the ideologies
of the past and the echoes of the past in the present, it is significant to note
that the traditional line of historical interpretation of Digenis has alter-
nated between explaining away and simply ignoring these deeply trou-
bling aspects of the text. Indeed, this tradition begins with the narrator of
the text himself, who opens his narrative with words of praise:
Ἔπαινοι καὶ τρὀπαια κατορθωμάτων

τοῦ τρισμάκαρος Ἀκρίτου Βασιλείου,
τοῦ ἀνδρειοτάτου τε γενναιοτάτου.
Praises and trophies for the achievements

of the thrice-blessed Basil the Frontiersman,
the bravest and most noble.108
It then closes with a brief prayer that when Christ returns in judgment, he
will “[…] τήρησον καὶ φύλαξον ἀτρώτους, | τοῖς δεξιοῖς συντάττων τε
μέρεσι τῶν προβάτων” ([…] cherish and preserve Digenis and his wife
unharmed, | setting them at your right hand with the sheep).109 Implicit
within these statements is uncritical praise and deep admiration for the
deeds of the hero. This is the ideology of patriarchy: a man who rapes and
kills (and lies to) women, who sport hunts animals, and who generally lives
a life of unrepentant violence and conquest. In claiming Digenis Akritis as
“the national epic of the modern Greeks” during the territorial struggles
of the early twentieth century, the diplomat, politician, and folklorist
Nikolaos Politis was summoning certain aspects of Digenis that he felt
spoke to his moment: Digenis as soldier, as border warrior, as defender of
Greece.110 And yet, inevitably, in embracing Digenis for these political
purposes, he was willing either to overlook or to accept that along with
107
The exclusion of women and animals (and other marginalized groups) from this com-
munity, and the possible avenues for rebuilding a new and more inclusive community, is the
basis upon which, for instance, Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams conceive of the idea
contained in the title of their book: The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics.
108
DA 1.1–3.
109
DA 8.306–307.
110
For which, see Mackridge, Language and National Identity, 284.
that vision of Digenis also came the rest of his character: rapist, murderer,
animal hunter, despoiler of the environment.
“The Frontiersman of Double Descent”

and the Sexual Ecopoetics of Gender and Space
Digenis himself is in almost every way a liminal creature; indeed, as schol-

ars have long noted, this identity is inscribed in his name: Digenis, “of
double descent” in Jeffreys’ translation,111 as descended from an orphaned
Arab Christian112 who converts to Islam when he is adopted by Muslim
Arab relatives and then converts back to Christianity when he marries the
Greek-born Christian woman who is his prisoner. This multigenerational
genealogical liminality is complemented by his geographic liminality: his
surname, Akritis, means “frontiersman,” a man who lives along the con-
tested, violent, and lawless Byzantine–Arab border.113 Digenis is liminal in
ways far more abstract as well: in him (and his wife) the boundaries
between human and non-human animal, between plant and animal, dis-
solve (and, in their erotic fantasies of one another as various plants and
animals, so do the lines of species-bound normativity in sexual encoun-
ters); in his rape of the abandoned Arab girl and his subsequent rejoining
of her to her husband, and in his sparing and then murder of Maximou, he
is both violator and enforcer of socially constructed sexual normativity.114
111
Denison Hull translates the name as “The Two-Blood Border Lord” and John
Mavrogordato as “Twyborn.” For Digenis Akritis as a “speaking name,” see Jeffreys,
“Afterlife of Digenes Akrites,” 142.
112
If Jeffreys is correct in her note that the Emir’s references to his bloodline suggest his
descent from the Paulicians. That he originally began life as a Christian seems implied by his
statement that his mother gave him to “Συγγενεῖς Ἀράβους | οἵτινες με ἀνέθρεψαν εἰς
Μωάμετ τὸν πόθον” (Arab kinsmen | who brought me up in the love of Mohammed), sug-
gesting that he switched religious affiliations when he left his birth family (1.287–288). For
the convoluted nature of conversion and interfaith marriage in the medieval romance and in
Digenis, see Goldwyn, “Interfaith Marriage in Medieval Romance.”
113
For the historical background to the title and the requirements of military commanders
on the border, see Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, xxxii–xxxiii.
114
Linos Politis calls Digenis’ “duel with the amazon Maximò […] one of the finest epi-
sodes in the whole epic,” a judgment very much dependent on the operative definition of
fine, which here must refer to stylistic or rhetorical concerns rather than subject matter
(Politics, History of Modern Greek Literature, 23). The remark is particularly noteworthy in
light of the rest of Politis’ general summary of the work, summarizing Digenis’ achievements
as “his hunting of wild beasts, his love story (an elopement with the girl’s cooperation), his
retirement to the frontier where he became an akrite, and his own death” (History of Modern
76 A.J. GOLDWYN
In his tender and attentive cultivation of the pleasure garden and its
domesticated plants and animals wherein he and his wife reside on the
frontier, he is a lover and cultivator of nature; in his reflexive and proud
slaughtering of wild animals, he is its unrepentant despoiler. The spaces he
inhabits are central to the construction of this liminal identity and to
understanding the intersection of environment and ideology: Digenis’
interest is in control; thus, the women, animals, and inhabitants of the
wild spaces must be tamed, while those who are already tamed can be
treated more gently.
Digenis’ liminality is inscribed not only in his name, but also on his
body. As the metaphors used to describe his battles with the wild animals
suggest, Digenis is a sort of chimeric predator, exemplified by the lion
teeth and claws he wears. But as a liminal figure, Digenis is also adept at
moving back and forth between the wilderness and the courtly society.
After his first hunt, for instance, Digenis, the wild predator who lays aside
his sword and prefers to hunt unarmed or with only a stick, looks like an
animal: he is covered in sweat and his clothes are “[…] μεμμιαμένα | ἐκ
τῶν θυρίων τοὺς ἀφροὺς καὶ λέοντας τὸ αἷμα” ([…] soaked | with foam
from the wild beasts and the lions’ blood).115 And yet, before his return to
human society, he washes all the blood off and changes into clothes so rich
and elaborate that they are detailed in twenty-six lines.116 As his later meet-
ing with the Emperor shows, Digenis can move seamlessly between the
rarified world of the court and the harsh world of the borders; he can
speak the language of courtly decorum and the language of the hard-
scrabble border guerillas.
As he transgresses the liminal space between human and non-human
animal, so too does his encounter with the guerillas demonstrate his trans-
gression of the gendered dichotomy between men and women: Jeffreys
notes that the ποδέα (kilt) that he wears “is not a common term” and can
also be used “of a tunic worn by women in the fourteenth century.”117
Jeffreys notes that “the garment is mocked by Philopappous at E658”118
Greek Literature, 23). The summary is careful to note that the girl offers consent to the
kidnapping, though, as with his description of Maximou, it ignores the undertones of vio-
lence directed at these women, much less the animals that are the first point of pride for “the
hero of the epic” (History of Modern Greek Literature, 23).
115
DA 4.206–207.
116
DA 4.220–245.
117
Digenis Akritis, xi.
118
Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, xi.
when he questions Digenis’ fitness to join their band: “Θεωρῶ σε, κύρκα,
ὑπόλιγνον καὶ ὡς ἀχαμνὰ ζωσμένον | καὶ χαμηλὰ ἡ ποδέα σου καὶ οὐ ποιεῖς
ἐσὺ ἀπελάτης.” (I can see, my sweetheart, that you are rather slender and
delicately dressed | and your kilt is long: you would never make a
guerilla).119 Digenis is feminized through his dress and his figure, and
Philopappous, questioning his manhood, calls him by an ironic term of
endearment meant for women, “sweetheart.” The connection of mascu-
linity to animals is also reiterated in this scene, as Philopappous questions
whether Digenis can endure the hardships of guerilla life, including lack of
food and water, “καὶ ἀπέκει ὡς λέων νὰ βρουχισθῆς, νὰ ἔβγουν τὰ λεοντάρια
| νὰ ἐπάρης τὰ δερμάτια των καὶ ἐδῶ νὰ μὲ τὰ φέρης” (and then roar like a
lion to bring out the lions | and get their hides and bring them back to me
here)120 and also burst in on wedding parties “νὰ ἐπάρης τὴν νεόνυμφον”
(and seize the newly wedded bride).121 That is to say, being so effeminate,
he questions whether Digenis could still be a man, represented by lion-
killing and women-snatching. Digenis replies that of course he can, “πέντε
χρονῶν τὰ ἐποῖκα” (I did that when I was five),122 and that he could also
run down a hare and catch partridges. He then proceeds to defeat the
entire army in combat unarmed, thus justifying through animal death a
masculinity challenged by female attire.
But it is not just Digenis and the other men he encounters whose iden-
tities and ideologies are represented through the spaces they inhabit; the
women, too, are creatures of their environment.123 Digenis, for instance,
finds his future wife in a house all of gold and marble, and within the
house, in a solitary room, also made entirely of gold and mosaics, where
she can only look out through a peep-hole.124 The narrator comments
ambiguously on the house: “Μόνον γὰρ οἶκον τὸν αὐτῆς οὐδεὶς ἐγκωμιάσει”
(Even this house no one will be able to praise).125 Given the overall lan-
guage of praise in which the work as a whole operates, the sentence almost
119
E657–658.
120
E663–664.
121
E668.
122
E671.
123
Sarah Ekdawi et al. note that in the E text, “the liminal state of Digenis’ wife and her
unconventional lifestyle (Ekdawi et al., “Bold Men,” 41) is marked by “spend[ing] her mar-
ried life out-of-doors instead of indoors—being thus caught in the male domain, she invari-
ably behaves inappropriately” (“Bold Men,” 40).
124
DA 4.267–271.
125
DA 4.267.
78 A.J. GOLDWYN
surely means that no one can praise it because it is so great, but the ambig-
uous phrasing also lends itself to an interpretation that there is nothing
about it worth praising, and indeed, for the young girl, it is, despite its
wealth, a prison, the sterility of which reflects the sterility of a life devoid
of love.
By contrast, when Digenis takes her to the frontier, she finds herself in
a markedly different physical environment, in a meadow containing a vari-
ety of plants and other natural features:
Κάλαμοι ἐπεφύοντο εἰς ὕψος ἐπηρμένοιμ

ὕδωρ ψυχρὸν ἀνέβλυζεν ἐν μέσῳ τοῦ λειμῶνος
καὶ πανταχοῦ διέτρεχεν τῆς γῆς ἐκείνης πάσης.
Reeds grew there, reaching upwards,

cold water bubbled up in the middle of the meadow
and flowed out all over the ground there.126
The description of the rich foliage, verdant plants, and diversity of animal
life continues for several more lines, until the description of the girl herself
planted in the middle.127 As the wilderness is an extension of Digenis, so
too the girl finds her way back to her own natural environment; no longer
caged in a sterile holding cell in which she is denied sexual and sensual
pleasures, she finds in the flourishing garden a location where she too can
express her own sexuality and find sexual satisfaction.
Other women, however, are not so lucky. The contrast between Digenis’
wife and the abandoned Arab girl he meets is established at first by the
different natural environments in which they reside:
ἀνύδρους τε καταλαβὼν κάμπους τῆς Ἀραβίας

[…]
ἔνδιψος ὅλος γέγονα (πολὺς γὰρ ἦν ὁ καύσων)
καὶ πανταχοῦ ἐσκόπευα ποῦ τὸ ὕδωρ ὑπάρχει.
Reaching the waterless plains of Arabia

[…]
I looked all round for where water might be found.
Ι saw a tree some way off, by the dense swamp.128
126
DA 6.18–20.
127
DA 6.29–41.
128
DA 5.25; 29–30.
At this swamp in the hot and arid desert, “ἄβατος καὶ ἀλσώδης” (pathless
and marshy),129 Digenis finds the girl. The starkness of the natural envi-
ronment, a lifeless desert with no water, represents the situation of the
young girl abandoned by her husband: without a man, she cannot flourish
like Digenis’ wife in her garden.
The sexual ecopoetics at work in these passages can be illuminated
through the application of queer ecocriticism, with queer in this sense
meaning not homosexual, but simply modes of sex, sexual expression,
and consent that are taboo within the dominant cultural discourses oper-
ative in other contexts. Megan Moore argues that the speech in which
the Emir’s mother castigates him for his conversion highlights how “the
danger of the cross-cultural love affair lies in the renunciation of this
identity of empire, the identity of propagation and extermination” and
that it thus “threatens the basis of a man’s identity, his masculinity. In the
end, her critique equates cross-cultural love with the loss of masculinity.”130
This is the masculinity of “the systems of monocultural identity,” and
Moore argues that the intercultural marriage of the Emir and his wife
and Digenis and his wife create space for “new kinds of religious and
cultural practices and for the articulation of new, hybrid kinds of
masculinities.”131 As one of the determining markers of socially con-
structed masculinities is sexuality and sexual practice, the new definition
of masculinity also necessarily entails new conceptions of sex. Both
Digenis and his father exemplify this principally through their violation
of foundational sexuality: their rejection of marriages arranged by fami-
lies in favor of marriages coerced through force entails a fundamental
rejection of normative sexuality.
Indeed, this non-normative sexuality is a constitutive part of their bor-
derland identity. Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, for instance, note the
ways in which rural spaces offered homosexuals in the twentieth century
(the text under analysis is Brokeback Mountain, the 2005 film based upon
Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story of the same name) a personal and sexual
identity distinct from the more pervasive forms rooted in cities. This “nat-
ural—masculine, rural, virile” mode is central to “the powerful ways in
which understandings of nature inform discourses of sexuality, and also
129
DA 5.40.
130
131
80 A.J. GOLDWYN
the ways in which understandings of sex inform discourses of nature.”132

Digenis’ masculine hardness is at odds with the softness of the urban
emperor and his court: when the lion bursts into their meeting, the
emperor and his men run away; Digenis stays and kills it.
In Brokeback Mountain, this division between urban and rural sexuali-
ties “is part of an ongoing narrative strategy by which the film distances
both men [i.e. Jack and Ennis, the central lovers in the film] from the taint
of urban, effeminate—what Judith Halberstam has called ‘metronorma-
tive’—articulations of gay male identity.”133 Like Jack and Ennis (though
heterosexual), Digenis moves to the borderlands because of the demands
of his profession, but he finds there a fuller expression of his sexuality in
ways that mirror, in theory if not in practice, those found by the lovers in
Brokeback Mountain:
Jack and Ennis are free to explore their sexual relationship in a way that
is simply not possible in the small Wyoming town from which they set
out. Wilderness is, in this film, portrayed as a vast field of homoerotic
possibility; the two rugged men romp and tumble freely, watched, for the
most part, only by rugged mountains. Their desire is both constituted
and consummated in a lush hanging river valley surrounded by trees and
dramatic, snow-striped peaks; wilderness becomes a “safe” place for outlaw
sex.134
Digenis’ queer (yet heterosexual) desires are manifest in his unwillingness

to submit to urban normative sexuality in two ways. First, like Jack and
Ennis, the wilderness offers “a vast field” of, in Digenis’ case, heterosexual
possibility. Denied the opportunity to have sex with the girl he desires by
the restrictive sexual norms enforced by her father and the larger urban
and elite social and sexual norms to which he adheres, Digenis steals her
away to the wilderness, with its different and more permissive sexual
norms. In the wilderness, too, where laws are less strictly enforced and
physical strength is the arbiter of justice, Digenis is able to rape and mur-
der women with a freedom he would not be allowed in the city: “On the
issue of consent, we note a reference to the ancient distinction, enunciated
in Deut. 22:23–24, between seducing a woman in the city (where she is
132
133
134
presumed to have consented) and in the country (where the absence of

consent is assumed).”135 The wilderness offers Digenis an opportunity for
the kinds of non-normative and non-consensual sexual encounters that he
had been previously denied. Second, like Jack and Ennis, the environmen-
tal context of the sex acts mirrors the emotional content of the acts them-
selves: the “lush hanging river valley” is almost exactly the same as the
verdant pleasure garden on the banks of the Euphrates in which Digenis
and his beloved make their home, and the opposite of the dry desert in
which Digenis finds the abandoned Arab girl. Digenis’ preference for out-
door sex, both with his wife and with his sexual assault victims, similarly
marks a queer sexual preference that further grounds the metaphorically
hybrid human–animal and human–plant sexual encounters in the broader
discourses of human liminality.
In her analysis of The Knight’s Tale, Dorothy Yamamoto makes two
points about the relationship of humans to non-human animals and the
natural world. First, she suggests that her “argument, therefore, is that
Arcite and Palamon, within the Tale, act, and speak, to problematize the
normative view of man’s status, as a ‘divyne beest’ qualitatively distinct
from animal creation” and, later, that “the possible permeability of the
boundary between animals and humans is one of the themes of The
Knight’s Tale.”136 Digenis, his father, mother, and wife similarly suggest
this very permeability, demonstrating the insufficiency of the binary to
account for their behavior, the environments in which they move and live,
the rhetorical terms in which they are described, and thus the metaphori-
cal interspecies sexualities they represent. As much as Digenis Akritis pri-
oritizes certain kinds of male identities, ideologies, and behaviors, it also
participates in the deconstruction of these very categories: Digenis rejects
the traditional markers that separate the human from the non-human ani-
mal: he rejects tools (i.e. his sword) when hunting, he violates social norms
controlling sexual expression (via rape), he sleeps and has sex outdoors,
and he does all these things while living in the wild borderlands beyond
the limits of the customs, laws, and socio-political structures that could
tame him.
135
Laiou, Consent and Coercion, 143.
136
Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human, 144.
82 A.J. GOLDWYN
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CHAPTER 3
Rape, Consent, and Ecofeminist Narratology

in the Komnenian Novels
As Rhodanthe and Dosikles opens, a pirate fleet falls upon Rhodes and, in
his description of the scene of chaos and destruction that follows, the nar-
rator notes that “οἱ βάρβαροι γὰρ έχιόντες αὐτίκα | βότρυς ἐπάτουν καὶ
κατέκλων ἀμπέλους” (as the barbarians rushed out immediately, | they
trampled the grapes and tore down the vines).1 They go on to burn the
ships and slaughter people in graphically described ways,2 but the priority
given to the destruction of the grapes and vineyards signals important
ecocritical considerations: first, that in an account of the destruction
caused by human conquest, the natural world has more than simply eco-
nomic value as a producer of agricultural commodities (though its eco-
nomic function is suggested by the destruction of the cargo ships that
would presumably transport the wine) and the deaths of people, and, sec-
ond, that destruction of the natural world is linked in real and symbolic
terms to the destruction of these other things. The destruction of grapes
and vines in particular, too, is significant, in that vineyards represent one
of the earliest markers of civilization: they are the core components of
wine, an important economic commodity and a symbol of human society.
Unlike the roving pirate fleet, the people of Rhodes cultivate crops. In
destroying the grapes, the barbarian pirate fleet thus not only destroys the
civilized city of Rhodes, but also its future and its joy.
1
R&D 1.10–11. For the dating and manuscript tradition of each of the novels, see the
introduction to each in Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels.
2
“Ἄλλου κεφαλὴν ἐξέκοπτεν ἡ σπάθη, | ἄλλος διχῇ τέτμητο πανθήκτῳ ξίφει” (One man’s
head was hewn off by a sword, | another was split apart by a whetted blade) (R&D 1.15–16).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6_3
86 A.J. GOLDWYN
From a more literary perspective, this opening reference to the destruc-

tion of the grapes and vines marks the first iteration of a metaphorical con-
ceit that will play out in myriad ways over the course of the novel: the lovers
themselves, the societies of which they are a part, and ultimately the inter-
generational continuity of families and societies will be rendered in the met-
aphorical language of gardens and gardeners, wines and vintners, and
women and grapes. Through such metaphors, the lovers and their families
are depicted as tangled and woven together like the vines themselves.
The crushing of the grapes—and the opening scene as a whole—also
sets out major themes that Rhodanthe and Dosikles shares with Digenis
Akritis: the violence done to the natural world has its corollary in political
violence towards men and sexual violence towards women, manifestations
of the same markers of patriarchal oppression and issues of consent that
Rhodanthe and Dosikles shares not only with Digenis Akritis but with the
other Komnenian novels and Palaiologan romances as a whole. The crush-
ing of the grapes is thus both a reflection of the reality of the pervasive and
manifold violence in the storyworld and representative of the figurative
language used to describe it.
The issue of sexual violence in the novels has long been a fraught sub-
ject in the scholarship; while much of the literature on the subject has
overlooked this aspect entirely, even among those works that address sex-
ual violence directly, no consensus has emerged.3 Judith Herrin notes that
in the context of the family, tolerance and repression seem to be concepts

which barely apply before our own times. Issues of child abuse and wife
beating are probably universal, but they have not been identified as suppres-
sive and intolerable until recently. The individual human rights of women
and children have only slowly been recognized, over the course of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, and there is no way we can project such
notions back into the medieval past.4
She is surely right about the importance of caution in projecting modern

opinions onto medieval people, but the Byzantines themselves, like the
Greeks, Romans, and early Christians, whose heritage informed their own
3
See, for instance, Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” in which Burton argues that
“Prodromos’ remarkable innovation of a non-consensual abduction of the heroine by the
hero seems to have escaped notice” (377), and 377 n.1 and n.2 for a summary of the previ-
ous scholarship. Burton may not be entirely correct in this, since Jouanno had already
pointed to such possibilities in “Les barbares dans le roman byzantin.”
4
Herrin, Unrivalled Influence, 262.
RAPE, CONSENT, AND ECOFEMINIST NARRATOLOGY IN THE KOMNENIAN… 87
cultures and legal codes, did have a variety of norms, concepts, and laws,
as well as the terminology to distinguish among various kinds of interac-
tions between men and women, including those relating to sex, marriage,
and consent.5 Lynda Garland’s claim that “the chastity of the heroines or
heroes is never seriously threatened except by the importunities of their
own lovers” is thus perhaps too dismissive.6 Further, Corinne Jouanno has
pointedly noted that, as in the ancient novel, so too in its Byzantine coun-
terpart, “the world depicted […] is factually androcentrist”7 and that the
“sexism of Byzantine writers appears clearly in their use of the abduction
motif.”8 In the particular case of Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Joan Burton
argues that “scholars tend to speak slightingly of Prodromos’s treatment
of this abduction, perhaps in part because the innovation of its non-con-
sensual nature has been unrecognized.”9
Indeed, sexual violence and the threat of sexual violence are pervasive
throughout the novels; it is no coincidence that upon being captured,
Dosikles’ thoughts turn quickly to the nature of the violence to which he
and Rhodanthe will be subject:
Ἰδὼν γὰρ ἴσως τὴν κόρην ὁ ληστάναξ

ἔρωτος εὐθὺς ὑποδέξεται φλόγα
καὶ πῦρ ἀνάψει λάβρον ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ,
βιάσεται δὲ τὴν Ῥοδάνθην εἰς γάμον.
κἄν μὲν τύχῃ, θάνατος εἰς Δοσικλέα
ἤ βαρβαρικῷ θανατούμενον ξίφει,
ἤ τῆς ἑαυτοῦ παλάμης ἀντιστάσει.
εἰ δ᾽οὐ τύχῃ, θάνατος εἰς τὴν παρθένον.
καὶ μὴ τυχὸν πρόχειρον εἰς φονοθργίαν.
5
For which, see for instance, Angold, Church and Society; Laiou, Consent and Coercion;
Evans-Grubbs, “Abduction Marriage”; Burton, “Elopement and Abduction”; and Karlin-
Hayter, “Further Notes on Byzantine Marriage.”
6
Garland, “Be Amorous but Be Chaste,” 73. Garland lists no fewer than twelve separate
acts in Rhodanthe and Dosikles alone in which both men and women reject unwanted
advances, most often those of slaves toward their masters or other social superiors (73 n.43).
7
Jouanno, “Women in Byzantine Novels,” 143.
8
9
Burton, “Elopement and Abduction,” 387 and following for her discussion of previous
scholarship. Anthony Littlewood describes the garden in both the ancient novel and the
Byzantine romance as the “frequent […] scene for erotic action” and notes that “seven gar-
dens are used for love-making and one, chronologically the first in the series, for rape,” a
reference to Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon of the first or second century ce, which
became a major source for Hysmine and Hysminias.
88 A.J. GOLDWYN
For perhaps when the robber chief sees the girl

he will immediately succumb to the fire of love
and will kindle a burning flame in his heart
and will force Rhodanthe into marriage.
And if that happens, there is death for Dosikles,
slain either by the barbarian’s sword
or by the intervention of his own hand.
If it does not, then there is death for the maiden Rhodanthe,
for barbarians are hot for love
and when thwarted quick to turn to murder.10
Dosikles’ first fear is that his beloved will become a sex slave; like the
Emir’s wife and the mutilated girls whose corpses are strewn in the ravine
in Digenis, Rhodanthe too faces the slave’s choice of serial rape (“will
force Rhodanthe into marriage”) or violent death (“when thwarted turn
quick to murder”). Dosikles also presents his own fate as entangled with
that of Rhodanthe, for his life (either through murder or suicide) hangs in
the balance with hers, an entanglement that also manifests itself narrato-
logically in the tangled train of Dosikles’ thoughts, which move first to
Rhodanthe’s fate, then to his own, then back to Rhodanthe’s. As the texts
focus specifically on the preservation of chastity in adversity, much of the
narrative tension must revolve around threats to that chastity, which come
then in the form of coercion and violence.
Indeed, Dosikles not only contemplates raping Rhodanthe, he even
tells other people that he had considered it.11 He says that when he was
rebuffed in his attempt to marry her, he asked himself:
Ἤ που τὸν οἶκον αὐθαδῶς τῆς παρθένου

νύκτωρ ὑπελθὼν συγκροτήσω τὴν βίαν;
Καὶ πῶς ἀέλπτως ἐμπεσὼν κοιμωμένῃ
οὐκ ἄν ταράξω καὶ θροήσω τὴν κόρην;
Should I boldly approach the maiden’s house

by night and apply force?
But, falling on her unexpectedly as she lies asleep,
how should I not alarm and terrify the girl?12
10
R&D 1.102–111.
11
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” 387.
12
R&D 2.284–287.
In deciding not to rape her, his focus is on the mechanics and conse-
quences of the plan; Rhodanthe’s own desires and agency are never taken
into account. Indeed, he even refers to himself as a rapist, thus affirming
his own knowledge of and indifference to her withholding of consent. He
fears “Ῥήξοι δὲ φωνήν” (she would let out a shriek) and that people would
hear her and come to arrest “τὸν βιαστὴν Δοσικλέα” (the rapist Dosikles),13
or that his parents would find out and he would “ἀπελπιῶ δὲ καὶ Ῥοδάνθης
τὸν γάμον” (lose all hope of marriage with Rhodanthe).14 Even the sup-
posed hero of the story is unconcerned with the consent of his beloved,
thinking only of the social and sexual consequences for himself that would
result from failure.15
Such is the pervasiveness of sexual violence that Dosikles is not even the
only prisoner in the hold of the pirate ship for whom violence against
women is the central concern. While lamenting his fate, another Greek
slave on the ship, Kratandros, begins to share his story of how he ended
up there. In what Elizabeth Jeffreys calls “an ill-organized abduction” that
stands in sharp contrast to those of Digenis, Dosikles, and the other suc-
cessful lovers, Kratandros had attempted to carry off his beloved
Chrysochroe, but she was accidentally killed when her keepers, aiming a
stone at him, missed and fatally struck her in the head.16 Hearing of
Chrysochroe’s death and thinking Kratandros the murderer, her father
Androkles laments that she had not had the chance to get married.
Addressing his lament to her, he cries:
ἀλλ’ ἐτρυγήθεις τοῦ προσώπου τὴν χάριν

ἔαρος ἀκμάζοντος, οὐδὲ τὴν τρύγην
ἔμεινεν ἐλυεῖν ἡ βροτοφθόρος Τύχη.
Ὤ μητρὸς ὡράισμα, πατρὸς καρδία,
ὦ δένδρον εὔχρουν, εὐπρεπές, καλόν, μέγα,
κενῶς ὑπανθοῦν, ὠραϊσμένον μάτην.
τίς ἄγροις θήρ, τίς θρασυβρέμων λέων,
λόχμης προελθὼν καὶ προκύψας ἐξ ὄρους,
τρίχας δὲ φρίξας καὶ σιμώσας αὐχένα,
ταχὺ φθάσας ἄκαρπον ἐξέκοψέ σε;
13
R&D 2.288–290.
14
R&D 2.295.
15
The scene is also discussed in Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” 387.
16
R&D 1.190–196.
90 A.J. GOLDWYN
But the grace of your countenance has been harvested

in the bloom of spring-time, and the mortal devouring Fate
did not wait for the harvest to come.
O adornment of your mother, heart of your father,
tree of lovely hues, comely, lovely, great,
blooming to no avail, adorned to no purpose
—what savage beast, what fiercely roaring lion
emerged from the copse and appeared from the mountain,
its mane bristling, its neck hunched,
and swiftly charged to cut you down in your immaturity?17
At the opening of the novel, then, the characters connect sexual violence
with violence to the environment; indeed, this lament encompasses each
of the metaphors found in the previous discussion of Digenis Akritis.
The father opens with a lament similar to that of the abandoned Arab
girl; the Arab girl, recently married, was a newly planted tree and, now
abandoned, was withering. Chrysochroe, never married, has “withered
before her time.” Both metaphors connect the life cycles of women with
those of trees. The zoomorphic metaphor is here represented as well,
with Androkles describing Kratandros as a lion, invoking the lover as
predatory lion. Yet the lion here does not hunt a prey animal; rather, the
metaphors become conflated and the lion becomes the bad gardener,
cutting down a blooming tree before it is ready.
Androkles uses both dendromorphic and zoomorphic metaphors to
suggest the youth and delicacy of the girl, the animal savagery of the
young man, and the inherent power dynamic between them that the lover
misuses to the detriment of both—as well as to his own ability to protect
his daughter, as a good gardener must. Thus, when, a few lines later, the
father laments that “Κἂν μὲν φυσικὸς τῆς τελεῦτης ὁ τρόπος” (And even
if the mode of death was natural) and again “ἡ τελευτὴ τῆς ἐμῆς
Χρυσοχρόης | θεσμῶν μέν ἐστι φυσικῶν ἀλλοτρία” (my Chrysochroe’s
death | is alien to all natural ties),18 his appeals to nature and what is natu-
ral are well within the established metaphorical discourse he has created.
From the literary perspective, then, this lament achieves a deeper pathos
through its use of this bitterly ironic juxtaposition of two different types of
natural: the mode of death was natural, that is, she, as a girl, was killed too
17
R&D 1.220.
18
R&D 1.235, 245.
soon (and by a rock rather than something man-made), but, as a blooming

tree or crop, it was unnatural, since crops are supposed to be harvested by
men and not destroyed by lions.
When Kratandros finishes his sad tale and asks Dosikles to tell his, the
latter also does so in ways that connect marriage with the harvest and the
lover/beloved with the gardener/gardened, and again wine comes to the
fore as a metaphor for civilization and for the love of Rhodanthe and
Dosikles. He describes how, while at a banquet with Rhodanthe,
Ἄλλοι τὸν οἶνον ηὐλόγουν τὸν ἐν Ῥόδῳ,

ὡς ἡδὺν εἰς ὄσφρησιν, ἡδὺν εἰς πόσιν.
ἐγὼ δὲ τοῦτον ηὐλόγησα πολλάκις,
ὡς εἰς Ῥοδάνθης πλσιάζοντα στόμα.
Some praised the Rhodian wine,

saying that it was sweet to taste and sweet to drink,
but I praised it repeatedly,
for coming near to Rhodanthe’s mouth.19
Dosikles then notes how another man courting Rhodanthe attempts to

flirt with her by taking a sip from a cup and then offering it to her; she,
however, refuses. Desperately in love by now, Dosikles immediately speaks
to his mother, who sends a serving girl to ask Phryne and Straton,
Rhodanthe’s mother and father, for her hand on his behalf:
Ἀπῆλθεν ἡ παῖς καὶ πρσειποῦσα Φρύνην

(Στράτων γὰρ ἀπῆν εἰς τρύγην τῶν ἀμπέλων)
καὶ μηνύσασα τῆς Φιλίννης τὸν λόγον
πικρῶν μετῆλθεν ἄγγελος μηνυμάτων.
“Στράτων” γὰρ εἶπεν “ἐις τελευτὴν τοῦ τρύγους
υἱῷ Κλεάρχου τῷ νέῳ πανολβίῳ
κατηγγῦησε τῆς Ῥοδάνθης τὸν γάμον.”
The girl went off and spoke to Phryne

(for Straton was away, harvesting grapes)
and reported Philinna’s message;
she returned, the bearer of bitter tidings:
For, “Straton,” she said, “has arranged at the end of the harvest
19
R&D 2.120–123.
92 A.J. GOLDWYN
Rhodanthe’s marriage with the young man

Panolbios, son of Klearchos, is to take place.”20
The timing of the marriage is put in terms of the harvest: that “Straton
was away, harvesting grapes” suggests not only the reality of life in an
agrarian society, but, in this context, that Rhodanthe is the grapes: both
women and crops are to be taken from their wild, uncontrolled state to
one under male domination (through wine-making and marriage) during
the period of the harvest. Unlike the abandoned Arab girl, who withered
on the vine, or Chrysochroe, who didn’t have the chance to ripen at all,
Rhodanthe will be harvested at just the right time.
Dosikles, however, is not to be deterred and, like the human–lion
hybrids Digenis and Kratandros, explains how “πρὸς τοὺς ἐμοὺς ἄπειμι
συγκυνηγέτας” (I went off to my hunting companions), and, in a daring
raid, defeats the men guarding Rhodanthe and carries her away.21 As in
Digenis, the lover becomes the hunter, carrying off the bride as he would
the victim of his hunt in what Joan Burton calls a legal “worst-case sce-
nario, a violent, non-consensual abduction of the heroine by the hero with
the help of armed accomplices.”22 But, having successfully hunted his
beloved, the zoomorphic metaphor gives way to the anthomorphic. As
Book 3 opens, the lovers leave a symposium at which everyone gets drunk
and falls asleep. Before the two lovers sneak off together for their first
conversation, Prodromos describes in great detail the effects of wine, thus
summoning the image of the trampled grapes with which the novel opens.
The uncivilized violence of the barbarian pirates is contrasted with that of
the peaceful Greek symposium. Indeed, the longest part of the description
of the sleeping guests concerns Nausikrates, who even as he sleeps contin-
ues to raise his hand to his mouth “ὡς οἷα κόνδυ δεξιῶς ὠρεγμένην” (as
though he were skillfully raising a cup) and in his dream continues to drink
wine.23
20
R&D 2.385–391.
21
R&D 2.400.
22
23
R&D 3.22. The scene is discussed in MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides, 141. The peace-
ful contentment of Nausikrates seen in this flashback is starkly at odds with his initial presen-
tation in the novel, during which he gives a brave speech before he is executed by Gobryas
in the immediate aftermath of the sack of Rhodes. Indeed, as he prepares for his execution,
he seems to recall the symposium that, though it happens three books later in the narrative,
had occurred only the day before, announcing boldly as he faces Gobryas’ sword:
Nausikrates’ intoxication by wine mirrors Dosikles’ intoxication by love

(Dosikles had, after all, initially fallen in love with Rhodanthe while watch-
ing her drink wine), and this parallel between love and wine forms the
symbolic and metaphorical backdrop for the site of the lovers’ first conver-
sation under a cluster of vines, which Dosikles describes in his own words:
[…] ἱστόρουν τὰς ἀμπέλους

καλὸν τελούσας χρῆμα τοῖς θεωμένοις.
Ἰδὼν ἔφης ἄν εὐφυῶς οὐδ’ ἀσκόπως,
ὡς τηλικαύτας ἀμπέλους τίκτειν ἔδει
τὸν τηλικοῦτον οἶνον. αἱ γὰρ μητέρες
τὰς ἐμφερεῖς φέρουσι μορφὰς τοῖς τέκνοις.
Ὡς δὲ προῆλθον ἐς μέσας τὰς ἀμπέλους
(συνηρεφεῖς δὴ παντάπασιν οἱ κλάδοι
τῇ καταπύκνῳ συνοχῇ τῶν φυλλάδων,
ὡς καὶ τὸν ἐγγὺς σφαλερῶς δεδορκέναι),
τότε ξυνῆλθον ἐς λόγους τῇ παρθένῳ.
Ἐξ οὗ γὰρ αὐτὴν ἁρπάσας Ἀβυδόθεν
φυγὴν τοσαύτην καὶ πλάνην ἐστειλάμην,
οὐκ εἶπον ούδέν, οὐκ ἐδεξάμην λόγον,
ἀνδρῶν ἀγνώστον ὁρμαθῷ συνεμλέοων.
Τότε προήχθην καὶ φιλῆσαι τὸ στόμα
καὶ προσπλακῆναι τῷ τραχήλῳ γνησίως.
ὡς δ’ οὖν μετασχὼν γλυκερῶν φιλημάτων
ᾔτουν φανῆναι καὶ γυναῖκα τὴν κόρην,
“ἐπίσχες ἄρτι κἀκ μόνων φιλημάτων
ἡμᾶς γινώσκοις” ἀνταπερκίνατό μοι.
χαίροιτε, δεῖπνα καὶ πότοι τῶν ἐν βίῳ

καὶ τῶν τραπεζῶν ἡ πολυτελεστέρα.
πλησθεὶς γὰρ ὑμῶν εἰς κόρον Ναυσικράτης
κάτεισιν εἰς Ἄιδος ἄσμενος δόμον,
ἐπόψεται δὲ νεκρικὰς εὐωχίας
Greetings, banquets and symposia of this life

and the delicacies of the table.
Nausikrates has had his fill of you
and goes gladly to the abode of Hades,
and will investigate the symposia of the dead. (R&D 1.488–492)
The full resonance of Nausikrates’ speech at the moment of his death only becomes clear
in light of the subsequent description of his contented drunken sleep at the symposium nar-
rated here. For an analysis of this passage in light of the broader context of dreams and death
in the novels, see MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides, 134.
94 A.J. GOLDWYN
[…] I examined the vines,

which are a good subject for contemplation.
Looking at them you would say from their nature and not at random
that vines of a certain sort should produce
wine of a certain sort, for mothers
display the characteristics that are also found in their children.
When I reached the middle of the vines
(for the branches were everywhere intertwined
in a dense canopy of leaves
so that a bystander could see it only with difficulty),
that I began my conversation with the maiden.
For from the time when I had abducted her from Abydos
and set out on such a great flight and wandering,
I had said nothing to her and had had no word from her,
since I was sailing with a band of unknown men.
But then I stepped forward and kissed her mouth
and clasped her truly around the neck,
and as I partook of her sweet kisses,
I asked that the girl become a woman.
“Hold back now and know me
from kisses alone,” she replied.24
The passage begins with the interlocking of their fingers as he takes her
hand and culminates in him winding his body around hers in a tight
embrace. But the setting of the passage, and Dosikles’ comments about
it, suggest the metaphorical affinity between the lovers and the vines.
Both are tightly intertwined with one another physically, a representation
of the emotional bonds that tie them together as well, as in the previous,
less elaborate versions of the twining vines in Digenis. Dosikles makes
explicit the link between the vines and human reproduction: the twining
of the vines reflects the generational similarities of mothers and their
children.
These elaborate anthomorphic metaphors are the rhetorical camouflage
that disguises the essential expression of patriarchy at the heart of Dosikles’
courtship of Rhodanthe: after the rebuttal of his initial attempt to marry her
through legitimate and culturally sanctioned means, he contemplates rape,
only giving up on the plan due to his fear she would shriek out loud, and
24
R&D 3.47–67.
settling instead on abduction by force to a foreign land, where he again

attempts to have sex with her. The floral rhetoric adds to the erotic and
charming stylization of this courtship, obscuring many of its more misogy-
nistic elements, and valorizes the otherwise much more morally ambigu-
ous behavior of the hero: Rhodanthe’s sexual agency, in this scene, is
limited to her refusal of consent and a hopeful reliance on the magnanim-
ity of the man who has kidnapped her that the she will not be raped any-
way or killed for her refusal. Indeed, Dosikles admits that he took
Rhodanthe’s hand, led her alone into a strange city at night, and attempted
to kiss her before he had even addressed a single word to her. In indirect
speech, he indicates that his first words to her were to ask for sex (“I asked
that the girl become a woman”), while her first words to him were “hold
back.”
As evidence of the pervasiveness of sexual violence and its connection
with metaphorical language drawn from nature, one need look no further
than the scene immediately after the lover’s meeting under the vines,
which narrates the barbarian Gobryas’ failed courtship of Rhodanthe.
While it contains all the same plot elements as Dosikles’ courtship, it is
narrated in a severe style devoid of rhetorical floral embellishment and is
constructed in such a way as to earn the audience’s ire rather than their
admiration.25 Gobryas
ἰδῶν Ῥοδάνθην ἐντρανεστέραις κόραις,

καταπλαγεὶς δὲ τοῦ προσώπου τὴν χάριν
καὶ συμπλολῆς ἔρωτα δυσγενεστέρας
θερμῶς ἐρασθείς (ὡς νόμος τοῖς βαρβάροις)
πέπονθεν ἐντὸς ἐς μέσην τὴν καρδίαν.
saw Rhodanthe with clearer eyes,

and struck by the charm of her face
and hotly desiring (as is the habit of barbarians)
the passion of a more carnal embrace,
he suffered deep in his heart.26
25
For an analysis of the way food and visual art in this scene draw from contemporary
imperial practice and from Byzantine literary history (i.e. the Satyricon), see Dauterman
Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, 37–41.
26
R&D 3.151–155.
96 A.J. GOLDWYN
In this, he differs in no way from Dosikles, who also fell in love with
Rhodanthe at first sight, before he knew anything about her; the gloss that
such behavior “is the habit of barbarians” is itself belied by Dosikles’ own
description of his abduction of Rhodanthe. Being in love, Gobryas goes to
his superior, Mistylos, and makes a passionate plea for her hand in mar-
riage. In this, he is also just like Dosikles, who also sought a legally sanc-
tioned means to marry Rhodanthe. Indeed, Gobryas suggests the
legitimacy of his claim for Rhodanthe’s hand based on the same terms that
allowed Dosikles to marry her, namely, that he captured her himself:
αἰτω παρασχεῖν εἰς γάμου κοινωνίαν.

Ἐγὼ γὰρ αὐτὴν συγκατέσχον ἐν Ῥόδῳ.
χειρῶν ἐμῶν λάφυρόν ἐστιν ἡ κόρη,
σπάθης ἐμηῆς ἅρπαγμα καὶ σύλον ξίφους.
I beg for her in the union of marriage.

For I captured her on Rhodes;
the girl is booty from my band of men,
plunder from my sword and loot from my dagger.27
His request, however, is rebuffed by Mistylos, who has already promised

that she will become a virgin priestess. The treatment of Gobryas’ and
Dosikles’ respective courtships of the girl further emphasize the racial
hierarchy at play in the romance: though Gobryas and Dosikles behave in
the same way, the Greek’s behavior is meant to be viewed as laudable,
while the barbarian’s is meant to be viewed with contempt. Thus when
Mistylos, sensing Gobryas’ disappointment, elaborates on the reasoning
behind his decision, he is inadvertently also telling a story with strong
parallels to Dosikles’ own behavior:
Εἰς σαυτὸν ἕλκων ἐξερεύνα τὸν λὀγον.

Σοι προφθάσας δέδωκα τὴν ξητουμένην.
μετῆλθεν ἄλλος, ἀνταπῄτει τὴν χάραν,
ἐν δευτέρῳ σου καὶ χαμερπὴς τὴν τύχην,
ὅσον θεῶν σὺ δευτερεύεις, Γωβρύα.
Ἐγὼ δὲ τὴν δέησιν εἰσεδεξάμην
καὶ τἠν κόρην δέδωκα τῷ ζητοῦντί με,
τοῦ σοῦ θαλάμου δυστυχῶς ἀναρπάσας.
27
R&D 3.173.
Ἐκαρτέρησας εὐφόρως τὴν αἰσχύνην;

Ἤνεγκας ἄν τῆν ὕβριν; Οὐ μὰ τὴν Δίκην,
ἀλλ’ εἰς ἄμυναν τοῦ κακοῦντος ἐτράπου.
Examine the argument with application to yourself.

I had already given you the girl you had asked for.
Someone else came up and demanded the gift in exchange,
he is in second place to you and as obscure in his status
as you are in relation to the gods, Gobryas.
I acceded to his request
and gave her to him who had asked me,
abducting the girl from your chamber.
Would you have borne this shame gracefully?
Would you have put up with the insult? No, by Justice,
but you would have gone off to take vengeance on the wrongdoer.28
This is indeed almost the exact circumstance surrounding Dosikles’ court-

ship of Rhodanthe. She had already been promised to Panolbios, a man by
Dosikles’ own estimation of at least as high, if not higher status than
Dosikles, but Dosikles came and took her anyway. In Mistylos’ example to
Gobryas here, Mistylos seems to make sense; his explanation is meant to
be taken as reasonable. Yet when Dosikles had earlier done the same thing
that Mistylos here condemns, he was lauded for it. The similarities in their
behavior continue, and again the race of the man rather than the method
of his courtship—both of which ignore the issue of the girl’s consent—is
the major driver of the narrator’s (and the audience’s) perspective on the
justice of the would-be lovers’ claims:
Οὕτως ἁμαρτὼν τῆς ποθουμένης κόρηςς,

ἐξ ἱκετικῆς προσωολῆς ὁ σατράπης
ἄλλην ὁδὸν τέτραπτο λῃστρικωτέραν
καὶ Γωβρύᾳ πρέπουσαν, αἰσχρῷ βαρβάρω.
νύκτωρ γὰρ ἔγνω συγκροτήσας τὴν βίαν,
καὶ μὴ θελούσῃ συμμιγῆναι τῇ κόρῃ.
Having thus failed to obtain the girl he desired,

the satrap changed from his approach as suppliant
to a more brutal method,
28
R&D 3.217–227.
98 A.J. GOLDWYN
one befitting Gobryas, an abominable barbarian:

for he decided to use force by night
and to have intercourse with the girl against her will.29
This, too, is what Dosikles did: he, too, was rejected in his initial approach
as suppliant and so he ambushed Rhodanthe and her guards and carried
her off by force. Thus, Dosikles’ and Gobryas’ behavior differ not at all:
both fall in love with a girl at first sight but, finding her unavailable
according to the customs and laws that govern them, resort to carrying
her off by force. The major difference is that Dosikles is a Greek and not
a barbarian, and thus forcible sexual encounters with non-consenting
women are justified. This parallels the situation in Digenis Akritis, for
Digenis, though a rapist like Gobryas, is nevertheless lauded by the author
despite having compelled the abandoned Arab girl to have sex with him
despite her best efforts to resist.30 Gobryas goes to tell Rhodanthe that he
wants to marry her
ὥρμα φιλῆσαι τῆς Ῥοδάνθης τὸ στόμα.

Ἀλλ’ ἡ κόρη φυγοῦσα τὴν τυραννίδα
καὶ τὸν βιαστὴν ἐκλιποῦσα Γωβρύαν.
29
R&D 3.265–270.
30
In a further similarity, Gobryas has also built his career through killing and city-sacking,
predicating his demand that Mistylos award him Rhodanthe as his share of the spoils because
τὸν σὸν γινώσκεις σατράπην τὸν Γωβρύαν

πολλαῖς ἐναθλήσαντα πολλάκις μάχαις,
πολλάς κατασκάψαντα δυσμενῶν πόλεις,
πολλὰς λαταστρέψαντα ναῦς ἀντιπλόους
καὶ τοὺς ἐν αὐταῖς ἀνελόντα ναυμάχους.
καὶ τοὺς ἐν αὐταῖς ἀνελόντα ναυμάχους.
you know that your satrap Gobryas

has striven often in many battles,
has razed many unlucky cities to the ground,
has destroyed many ships that sailed against us
and killed the crews in them. (R&D 3.1603–1604)
Dosikles’ backstory is itself unnarrated; he claims to be “ἀνὴρ γάρ εἰμι καὶ μάχαις
συετράφην” (a man reared in battles) (R&D 1.116), though it is unclear if these were purely
defensive battles or if Dosikles, too, has a history as a city-sacker and slaver.
and began to kiss Rhodanthe’s mouth.

But the girl escaped from the brute
and rushed away from the rapist Gobryas.31
The word rapist (βιαστὴν) was never used in connection with Digenis,
who did far more than simply force a kiss, and its use here is suggestive
more as part of the pattern of derogatory language directed at Gobryas
rather than as a means of defining his instrumental use of women as
opposed to that of the other men; in this passage alone, the narrator refers
to him as a brute (τυραννίδα) and a dog (κυνὸς).32 This analysis, of course,
is not meant to justify Gobryas’ actions—he is a slaver and a murderer and
is only prevented from becoming a rapist by Rhodanthe’s flight—but is
rather meant to emphasize the culturally constructed ways in which issues
of consent are manifested in these texts, an underlying assumption of
which is that Greek men have implied consent from Greek women, or
don’t require consent with regard to non-Greek women, while non-Greek
men can never have consensual sex with Greek women.
To this could be added the complications surrounding Rhodanthe’s
consenting to Dosikles; by Dosikles’ own admission, they did not speak a
word from the day of her capture until four days later when they landed at
Abydos.33 Given the undercurrent of male violence directed towards non-
consenting women in general and Rhodanthe’s own circumstances as a
girl who had never been alone in public in her own hometown, much less
a foreign land, any attempt to assume Rhodanthe’s consent, even via her
words (and, given how frequently Digenis lied about forcing sexual
encounters, it is no given that Dosikles as narrator has accurately recounted
the narrative himself), is muddied by the circumstances in which such
consent was obtained.
This difference with regard to consent is mirrored in the language used
to describe both Dosikles’ and Gobryas’ courtship of Rhodanthe.
Prodromos wraps Rhodanthe and Dosikles’ courtship in the rhetoric of
31
R&D 3.285. The scene is discussed in MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides, 143.
32
R&D 3.284, 286.
33
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” notes that “Rhodanthe’s first sight of Dosikles is
in the course of a violent abduction, performed with armed accomplices. There is no mutual
love, no reciprocity, no collaboration in the abduction as Dosikles describes it
(R&D 2.443–454)” (386). This is true, but the issue of consent is more complicated than
this, because Rhodanthe, as she sails away, jeers her former captors and praises her new ones
for rescuing her.
100 A.J. GOLDWYN
floral metaphors while narrating Gobryas’ failed courtship in a severe style

devoid of the figurative language that ennobles Dosikles’ actions. From
the perspective of an ecocritical narratology, then, this suggests that the
method of narration offers clues for how to interpret the events them-
selves. The assignation of nature metaphors and floral settings supports
the established cultural and social norms: for Greek women, barbarians are
not suitable for marriage while Greeks are—not because of differences in
behavior, but, rather, because of differences in narrative style.34
Gobryas’ unsuitability for love is symbolically reaffirmed later when one
of his companions breaks one of Gobryas’ particularly beautiful drinking
vessels. Prodromos first mentions that the vessel has been shattered before
proceeding to an elaborate ekphrasis to describe the item; thus, the reader
knows before the description that the vessel being described no longer
exists:
Ἑώρακας γὰρ ἐμπελάσας ἐγγύθεν

τῇ μὲν σταφυλάς ὡς ἐν ἀμπέλοις μέσαις,
καλάς, πεπείρους, εὐθαλεῖς, πλησιρράγους
καὶ τὸν τρυγητὸν ὥσπερ ἐκκαλουμένας,
τῇ δὲ τρυγῶντας ἄνδρας (οἷον ἐμπνόους),
τὰς σταφυλὰς κόπτοντας ἐκ τῶν ἀμπέλων
καὶ καλαθίσκοις ἐντιθέντας εὐπλόκοις.
Should you have come close you would have seen

on one side grapes as if in the middle of the vines,
excellent, ripe, flourishing, about to burst
and as if summoning the harvester,
while on the other side men (almost alive) harvesting and
cutting the grapes from the vines
and putting them in stoutly woven baskets.35
The vessel seems to show the kind of life Gobryas will never have, even
though he may want it. A barbarian and a pirate, Gobryas neither farms
nor harvests; indeed, the opening lines of the novel mark him as a trampler
34
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” discusses how, by using the rhetoric of hunting
and battling, Dosikles “refigure[s] the love project [to] help rationalize the violence” (387).
His friends, however, in speaking of attacking like pirates, “lay bare the criminal nature of
such a violent attack” (387).
35
R&D 4.344.
of vines (as of women).36 In line with the previous metaphors of the crop
as the young woman and the harvester as the young man, the vessel also
seems a fit metaphor for the kind of romantic love he will also never attain,
symbolized by the dropping and shattering of the glass with such an image
on it.
Shortly thereafter, Rhodanthe and Dosikles are again separated and
placed on separate ships. Rhodanthe’s ship strikes a rock and is destroyed,
though she herself is saved. Dosikles, however, thinking her dead, strikes
up a lament that again casts her in anthomorphic and dendromorphic
terms and in which she is compared to crops ruined before their time:
Ὤμοι Ῥοδάνθη, ποῦ τὸ τῆς ἤβης ἔαρ,

ἡ κυπάριττος τῆς καλῆς ἡλικίας,
τὸ τῆς παρειᾶς καὶ τὸ τοῦ χείλους ῥόδον,
ὁ τῶν πλοκάμων κιττός (ἡ ξένη χάρις),
ὁ τὴν κορυφὴν ὡς πλατάνιστον πλέκων;
Ποῦ σοι τὰ κρίνα τῶν καλῶν φιλημάτων,
τοῦ σώματος τὰ μύρτα, σαρκὸς ἡ χλόη,
τὸ τῶν βλεφάρων ἄνθος; Ὤμοι, παρθένε,
μαραίνετα τὸ μῆλον, ἡ ῥοιὰ φθίνει,
φυλορροεῖ τὰ δένδρα, πίπτει τὰ κρίνα.
εἰς γῆν ὁ καρπός, ἡ χάρις παρερρύη,
τοῦ μετοπώρου προφθάσαντος τὸν χρόνον.
Alas, Rhodanthe, where is the springtime of your youth,

the cypress of your fair figure,
the roses of your cheeks and your lips,
the ivy of your locks (that strange adornment)
which weaves around your head as if around a plane tree?
Where are the lilies of your fair kisses,
the myrtle of your body, the verdure of your flesh,
the flowers of your eyelids? Alas, maiden,
the apple has shrivelled, the pomegranate has withered
the trees have lost their leaves, the lilies have drooped;
the fruit lies on the ground, the charm has perished,
autumn has come to see upon the year.37
36
R&D 1.11.
37
R&D 6.291–302.
102 A.J. GOLDWYN
Rhodanthe here comes to embody the hybrid human–plant seen in the

romance traditions of Byzantium and elsewhere; she is composed of dif-
ferent parts of the plant grafted together on her body. And, as with the
previous instances where a young woman is killed or forced to marry
before her time, so is this antho- and dendromorphic Rhodanthe described
in the same way.
The types of metaphors—the predator–prey, the gardener–gardened,
and the hybrid tree–chimeric animal—all come together in the romance’s
denouement. A rival for Dosikles’ love, Myrilla, poisons Rhodanthe so she
becomes paralyzed. Dosikles despairs, but, being the predator he is, nev-
ertheless goes off hunting with his old friend Kratandros. On their hunt,
they find a bear whose right half is paralyzed. It comes to a grassy spot and
falls down on a strange flower
ἧς ῥίζα λευκή, φύλλον ἐμερφὲς ῥόδοις,

ῥόδοις ἐρυθροῖς, οὐχὶ λευκόχροις ῥόδοις,
χαμαιφυεῖς ἔχουσι καὶ πολλοὺς κλάδους,
ὧνπερ τὸ δέρμα φοινικοῦν τῆν ἰδέαν.
τρίχρους ἁπλῶς ἡ πᾶσα τῆς πόας χάρις.
whose roots were white, and whose leaves were like the roses’,
red roses and not white ones,
which had many earth-hugging stems
with a purplish covering:
briefly, the charming plant was tri-colored.38
Rubbing himself against the plant, the bear is cured of his paralysis. In her
translation, Jeffreys footnotes this passage with various references to
ancient medicine and botany and Prodromos’ interest in horticulture and
naturalism. While such suggestions are valuable from the historical and
philological points of view, a literary ecocritical reading offers a different
perspective. The bear is the mirror image of Dosikles himself: a predator
who is half-paralyzed because his right half, that is, his beloved, is also
paralyzed. The bear is thus a metaphor for the hero himself. And the solu-
tion to the bear’s problem is in a grafted plant. The flower, after all, is the
primary metaphor for the beloveds in these romances and so it is fitting
that a flower with three colors cures the bear, just as the curing of
Rhodanthe will cure Dosikles.
R&D 8.471–475.
38
But it is significant, too, that the plant is a hybrid plant, for it is through
the combination of the white roots, red rose leaves, and purplish stems that
the plant gets its unique healing properties. The three colors of the flower
represent the three characters—Rhodanthe, Dosikles, and Kratandros—
whose loyalty and steadfastness has ultimately resulted in the union of the
two lovers. The bear is thus healed, for the creature cannot survive with one
half paralyzed. And so too it is with marriage, for the strength of the union
(and presumably its children) lies in its combination of the male and female.
Thus, the novel emphasizes both the chimeric animal and the hybrid plant
as ideals. Indeed, as the lovers are married, Prodromos presents a magnifi-
cent ekphrasis of this human grafting together of family trees. When the
fathers of the bride and groom embrace the pair, Prodromos imagines the
foursome as a tetraktys, a chimeric animal with four bodies stemming from
a single head, which the authors claim to have often seen in delicately woven
fabrics and that again demonstrates, in stark anthomorphic language, the
grafting metaphors that define intergenerational relationships in the novels:
οὕτως ἀνακραγόντες οἱ γηραλέοι

ἄμφω προσεπλέκοντο τοῖς νεανίαις,
καὶ σχηματισμὸν καινὸν ἐξεζωγράφουν·
ᾡρῶντο γὰρ τέτταρες ἄνθρωποι κάτω
ὡς εἰς κεφαλὴν προσπεφυκότες μίαν.
Εἶδον κἀγὼ πολλάκις ἐν πολλοῖς πέπλοις
(οὓς δημιουργεῖ Σηρικὴ μιτουργία,
μία μὲν οὖσα τῷ λόγῳ τῆς οὐσίας,
πολυχρόοις δὲ ταῖς βαφαῖς κεχρωσμένη)
τοιοῦτον εἰκόνισμα καινοῦ ζωγράφου,
ὑφαντικῆς εὕρημα δηλαδὴ τέχνης·
μίαν κεφαλὴν εἰς τετρακτὺν σωμάτων
διαιρεθεῖσαν, ἢ τετρακτὺν σωμάτων
οἷον συνιζηκυῖαν εἰς κάραν μίαν·
ζῷόν τι τετράσωμον, ἢ τοὐναντίον
μονοπρόσωπον τεττάρων ζῴων πλάσιν,
λέοντα καὶ λέοντας· οἱ γὰρ αὐχένες
ἅπαν τὸ λοιπὸν σῶμα τῆς οὐρᾶς μέχρι
τοῦ θηρὸς ἐπλήθυνον τῇ διαστάσει·
τῷ δὲ προσώπῳ πάντες ἦσαν εἷς λέων.
Τούτοις ὁμοιόσχημον ἤθελε γράφειν
ἡ τῆς χαρᾶς χείρ, ἡ σοφὴ γεωμέτρις,
τῶν πατέρων τὸ σχῆμα καὶ τῶν παιδίων,
ὅτε προσεπλάκησαν ἀλλήλοις ἅμα.
104 A.J. GOLDWYN
Shouting this out, both aged men [the fathers]

embraced the young people,
and depicted a new design:
for four bodies could be seen beneath what appeared to be one head.
And I have often seen on many robes
(which the silken craft of weaving fabricate,
of one substance by definition
but tinted with multi-hued dyes)
such a design from an inventing painter,
truly an inventive art of weaving;
one head dispersed on the tetraktys
of the bodies or the tetraktys of the bodies
as it were merging into the one head;
a four-bodied animal, or the other way around—
a single-faced creature made up of four animals,
a lion and lions; for the necks
filled out as far as the tail
the remainder of the body with the bulk of the beast,
but, for the face, all were a single lion.
Some such design the hand of joy,
the wise geometer, attempted to sketch for them,
the design of the fathers and the children,
when they joined in their embrace.
Αnd it would have been easier to disentangle
two branches for long intricately intertwined
than the parents entwined with their children.39
Prodromos combines elements drawn from the stock metaphors of both

plants and animals: he begins by describing a kind of intergenerational
human graft familiar from the intertwining vines under which Dosikles
and Rhodanthe first kissed and the concept of family trees more generally.
39
R&D 9.316–339. The passage is the subject of extensive analysis in Roilos,
Amphoteroglossia, 54–57, citing also relevant bibliography, which focuses mostly on the
distinction between visual and literary arts. Roilos examines the passage in light of
Byzantine rhetorical tropes and ekphrastic technique and self-referential discourse
(“Prodromos makes real life, as depicted in his literary art, imitate pictorial art,” 56). And
though Roilos connects “a metanarrative metaphor” about weaving that had been scat-
tered throughout the work (57), he does not connect the weaving of the fabric into a new
creature with the various other forms of weaving and twining in the natural world and
among the human characters throughout the text (as in the example of the interwoven
hands under the interwoven vines).
But rather than rendering them as a plant, Prodromos reimagines them as

an animal: the parents and children embracing become a tetraktys, a chi-
meric animal with four bodies and one head. Then, the narrator compares
this image to a woven robe, summoning, of course, the image of the
threads of the fabric intertwining with one another. The tetraktys is then
described as a predatory animal, thus demonstrating the masculine side of
such a union associated with Dosikles. The concluding metaphor of the
passage, by contrast, recalls the feminine aspect of Rhodanthe, as
Prodromos compares the embracing families to “intricately intertwined
branches,” while also recalling the lovers’ first kiss in the vineyard under
the roof of intertwined branches and the trampled vines with which the
novel began. The symbiotic nature of true love here extends beyond the
lovers to their families (though, perhaps significantly, only their fathers)
and, through its association with plants and animals, to the larger natural
world of which they are a part.
Ecocritical readings of Digenis Akritis and Rhodanthe and Dosikles
reveal that metaphors drawn from the natural world have an important
function in the texts. They characterize the individual heroes and vil-
lains in the works; they demonstrate which loves are sanctioned and
which are not; and they add the kinds of rhetorical flourishes that give
the romances their enduring charm. Beyond these more plot-level
insights, ecocriticism also reveals larger cultural ideologies about politi-
cal hierarchy and gender roles. The racial hierarchy between Greek and
non-Greek is manifested through the application of floral metaphors to
the Greeks and a more severe narrative style for the barbarians, even
though the methods of courtship are largely similar. Young women have
no voice in their choice of husbands and are frequently at risk of rape
and sexual assault. The narratives themselves disenfranchise female
speakers and women’s subjectivity, telling the stories from the point of
view of the men.
Drosilla and Charikles
The continuity of these nature metaphors across the medieval Greek
romance can be further seen in Niketas Eugenianos’ Drosilla and Charikles.
Given that Drosilla and Charikles follows Rhodanthe and Dosikles so
closely at the level of plot, it makes sense that the figurative language and
underlying thematic concerns should also have significant overlap. Like
Rhodanthe and Dosikles, the opening scene features a pirate invasion that
106 A.J. GOLDWYN
kills many people and carries off the young lovers against their will. As
importantly from the ecocritical perspective, the destruction of the culti-
vated natural aspects of the city, that is, its orchards and fields, represents
the totality of the destruction caused by the invasion. Thus, the Parthian
invaders destroy both cultivated crops and people:
Τοὺς μὲν γὰρ ἐσπάθιζον ἄνδρας ἀθλίους,

οὓς ἀντιπίπτειν ἔβλεπον περιωμένους,
τοὺς δὲ προῆγον δεσμίους κρατουμένους.
Πᾶν συγκατέκλον δένδρον ἐξ ἀπληστίας,
καίτοι βρῖθον βλέποντες ἐξ εὐκαρπίας.
Τὴν αἶγα, τὴν βοῦν συγκαθήρπαζον τότε,
ἣ μὴ τὸ τεῖχος εἰσδραμεῖν ἐπεφθάκει.
Some [people] they put to the sword, wretches

whom they saw trying to resist;
others they took away bound in chains.
In their excess they cut down every tree,
although they saw they were heavy with fruit.
They also plundered those goats and cattle
which had not fled within the walls in time.40
As seen in the sack of Rhodes, wherein the fecundity of the grapes repre-
sented the city in bloom, well ordered and prosperous, the chopping
down of the trees heavy with fruit during the sack of Barzon here parallels
the cutting down of the citizens. Eugenianos follows this comparison of
the dead with particular reference to the deaths of mothers:
Γυναῖκας εἷλκον αἳ συνεῖλκον τὰ βρέφη.

ᾤμωζον αὐτῶν αἱ τάλαινι μητέρες,
καὶ συνεμινύριζον αὐταῖς τὰ βρέφη.
They dragged off women who dragged off their infants with them.
The unhappy mothers lamented,
and the infants wailed with them.41
Immediately following this, Eugenianos turns back to the destruction of

the crops:
D&C 1.23–29.
40
D&C 1.30–32.
41
ἐκεῖ στάχυς ἐτμᾶτο καὶ πρὸ τοῦ θέρους,

τὴν ἵππον ὡς θρέψαιτο τὴν τῶν βαρβάρων.
καὶ βότρυς ἁδρὸς ἐθλίβη πρὸ τῆς τρύγης,
ὄνυξιν ἵππων συμπατηθεὶς ἀθλίως.
There corn was cut even before the harvest

to feed the barbarians’ cavalry
and the firm grape was crushed before the vintage,
miserably trampled by horses’ hooves.42
Eugenianos’ description of the sack of Barzon emphasizes the entirety of

the disaster, linking the inhabitants of the city with their natural environ-
ment by shifting back and forth between describing the horrors that fall
on people and those that fall on the environment: first the men are killed,
then the trees are cut down, followed by the domesticated animals, the
women and children, and finally the crops.
The destruction of the city is thus expressed in parallel terms of human
and natural devastation: the men who defend the city are like the full-
grown trees that are chopped down, while the captured women and their
murdered infants are paralleled by the corn cut before the harvest and the
grapes gathered before turning ripe. And, as in Rhodanthe and Dosikles,
these similar behaviors mark the barbarism of the Parthians, who are nei-
ther cultivators of civilization, gardens, nor children, and thus the oppo-
sites of the refined heroic couple at the heart of the romance, who happen
to be outside that day in a lovely meadow.
Whereas Prodromos’ couple were captured after a symposium,
Eugenianos’ are captured during a picnic, and the meadow in which
they reside is depicted in great detail. The scene does, however, follow
the narratological pattern established by Prodromos: having begun by
narrating its destruction, this elaborate description of the meadow offers
a vision of a life that is already gone, just as the happiness of the charac-
ters at the symposium is given additional emotional force by the previ-
ous description of their enslavement and, in the case of Nausikrates,
death. This technique of describing a beautiful pastoral scene only after
it has been destroyed is also used in the description of Gobryas’ cup,
which narrated the destruction of a beautiful garden—even if one
42
D&C 1.36–39.
108 A.J. GOLDWYN
depicted on a cup—similar to the one in which Drosilla and Charikles

are residing.
Upon the separation of the lovers in slavery, Eugenianos follows
Prodromos’ pattern of alternating laments. Like Dosikles, Charikles
quickly turns to his fears for what might befall his beloved, with particular
focus on the physical brutality and sexual assault that were unavoidable in
female captivity:43
Ἄλγεῖς; Κροτῇ; Πέπονθας; Οὐ πάσχεις φθόρον;

Τίνος μετέρχῃ λέκτρον ἀρχισατράπου;
Ποῖός τις ἐχθρὸς ωῦν φανείς σοι δεσπότης
ἐκ δακτύλων σῶν τὸν κρατῆρα λαμβάνει;
Ἦ πού σε πολλῆς ἐμφορούμενος μέθης
τυχὸν πατάξει βαρβαρώδει κονδύλῳ
πταίουσαν οὐχ ἑκοῦσαν; Ὤμοι τῆς τύχης.
Are you in pain or being beaten or suffering? Surely you are not enduring
rape?
Which chief satrap’s bed are you sharing?
Which enemy, now declared your master,
is receiving his wine-bowl from your fingers?
Or perhaps in his advanced intoxication
he will strike you with his barbarian fist
for some unwitting offense. Oh, woe upon our fate!44
While Charikles is dwelling on the sexual violence that awaits Drosilla, she
is singing her own lament
διαρραγῆναι μηδαμῇ Χαρικλέος.

Κισσὸς γὰρ εἰς δρῦν δυσαποσπάστος ἔχει.
ἐθίζεται γὰρ συμπλοκαῖς ταῖς ἐκ νέου
καὶ σωματοῦται καὶ δοκεῖ πεφυκέναι
ἓν σῶμα, διπλῆν τὴν ἐνέργειαν φέρον.
οὕτω Δροσίλλα πρὸς Χαρικλῆν νυμφίον
ἓν σῶμα καὶ φρόνημα καὶ ψυχὴ μία.
43
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” suggests that Charikles, like Dosikles, had also
“contemplate[d] a forcible, non-consensual abduction of the heroine” and so knows some-
thing about rape as well (391).
44
D&C 1.236–242.
that she should never be divided from Charikles.

Ivy is inseparable from oak,
for it has been accustomed to its embrace from its first growth
and has become incorporated into it and seems to have developed
one body with a double energy;
even so Drosilla with her bridegroom Charikles
is one flesh and mind a single soul.45
The image of Drosilla as a hybrid plant–human is present even in the

rhetoric of Kleinias, the slaver son of the woman who owns her; though he
describes her in the conventional floral language,46 and even though he
45
D&C 1.323–329. This is, incidentally, nearly the exact language that Kleandros uses as
he describes the letters with which he wooed Kalligone:
Ἐξ ἡλίου φλέγοντος ὡς ὁδοιπόρος,

ὡς σκιερόν τι δένδρον ἐξεύρηκα σε.
ὡς κισσὸς εἰς δρῦν συμπλακείην παννύχως.
Like a wayfarer in the burning sun,

I have found you, my shady tree;
would that I could be entwined around you all night like ivyround an oak. (D&C 2.296–298)
Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, addresses this passage at length (214–215), with particular

emphasis on the textual allusions to the Song of Songs and allegorical readings in light of
Christian theology (213–221).
46
Εἰ γὰρ σε περκάζουσαν ἄμπελον βλέπω,
τὸ στέρνον ἐκθλίψει τίς ὡς γλυκὺν βότρυν,
ἢ γλεῦκος ῾δὺ νεκταρῶδες ἐκχύσει;
For if I look on you as a ripening cluster of grapes,

should one press your chest like a sweet grape
or pour out a nectar-like flow of a pleasant new vintage? (D&C 4.121–123)
and again later:
τὸ χρῶμα τερπνὸν οἷον αὐτοῦ ναρκίσου,

ἄνθος παρειπων ὡς ἐρυθρόχρουν ῥόδον,
[…]
οἱ βοστρυχοί σου κισσὸς ἐμπεπλεγμένος.
Your delightful complexion is that of a narcissus,

the bloom of your cheeks is that of a red-hued rose
[…]
your curling locks are entwined ivy. (D&C 4.127–128, 30)
110 A.J. GOLDWYN
uses the image of symbiotic trees to describe his feelings for her,47 his
unsuitability as a lover for Drosilla is made clear early in his dirge when he
uses a unique natural metaphor drawn from a mythological exemplum:
Καὶ πόντος οἶδεν Ἀρεθούσης τοὺς γάμους,

πρὸς ἣν γλυκὺς πρόεισιν ἀγκυλορρόας
Ἀλφειὸς εὐρύς, οὗ τὸ ῥεῖθρον ἐν σχέσει
ὁ συνδυασμὸς οὐ μετατρέπειν θέλει.
The ocean knows of the marriage of Arethousa,

approached by the sweet, sinuously flowing
broad Alpheios, whose waters, as they joined,
their union did not permit to mingle.48
The meaning of the metaphor is similar to that of the grafted or inter-

twined trees: in both cases, it is the merging of two separate phenomena
that is meant to parallel the union of the two humans. In this case, how-
ever, Kleinias draws on a natural impossibility—two streams that flow
together yet whose waters do not mix—to describe the impossibility of his
ever having a relationship with Drosilla.
He thus seeks consolation from his slave, Charikles, who pretends that
he himself was once in an analogous situation, and spins for Kleinias a
consolatory story about a girl he once met in a garden
καὶ βάλασμα βρέχουσαν ἐκροῇ ῥόδων,

λωτοὺς ὑακίνθους τε καὶ φυτῶν στίφη
καὶ κρίνα λευκὰ καὶ κρόκους καὶ ναρκίσους
καὶ πλεῖστον ἑσμὸν ἀνθέων ἡδυπνόων.
47
ἐρωμένης ἐρῶντος. ὢ ξένη σχέσις.
Ἐρᾷ δὲ φυτοῦ φυτὸν ἄλλο πολλάκις
φοῖνιξ δὲ πρὸς γῆν οὐδὲ ῥιζοῦσαι θέλει,
εἰ μὴ τὸ ηήλυ συμφυτεύσειας πέλας.
Τhe lover and the beloved; oh, strange relationship.

One plant often loves another;
a palm tree is unwilling to take root in the earth
unless you plant its mate close by. (D&C 4.141–144)
48
D&C 4.145–148.
shedding gentle balm among the basil

and bedewing the balsam with the roses’ exhalation,
and lotuses, hyacinths and a throng of plants,
and white lilies, saffron and narcissus,
and a great host of sweet smelling flowers.49
Unable to restrain himself, he addresses her: “χαίροις, φυτουργὲ τῶν

τοσούτων ἀνθέων” (Greetings, gardener to so many flowers),50 and asks
for entrance into the garden. Though he addresses her as the gardener, her
response to him characterizes her as the plant:
Ῥοδωνιᾶς τρύγησον ἐξ ἐμῆς ῥόδα.

ἀνακλίθητι. συγκατέρχομαι δέ σοι.
Φάγῃς δὲ τί, δείλαιε; Καρπὸς οὐκ ὥριμον ἐν κηπίῳ,
τὸ στέρνον ἡμῶν ἀντὶ μήλου προσδέχου.
εἴ σοι δοκεῖ, δύsτηνε, συγκύψας φάγε.
κἄν μὴ πέπειρος βότρυς ἀναδενδράδος
στέρνου στρυφνοῦ μοι θλίψον αὐτοῦ τὰς ῥάγας.
φίλημα τερπνὸν ἀντὶ σίμβλου μοι λάβε.
ἀντὶ περιπλοκῆς δὲ δένδρου καὶ κλάδων,
ἢν οἶδε τις δρᾶν καρπὸν ἐκτρυγᾶν θέλων,
ἐγὼ τὸ δένδρον. δεῦρο προσπλάκηθί μου.
ἀντὶ κλάδων ἐμὰς γὰρ ὠλένας ἔχεις.
ἐγὼ τὸ δένδρον καὶ προσανάναβηθί μοι.
δρέπου τε καρπὸν τὸν γλυκὺν ὑπὲρ μέλι.
Pluck roses from my bush;

recline I will join you.
Will you eat something, scoundrel? There is no fruit;
even if there is no ripe apple in the garden,
accept my breast in place of an apple;
if it pleases you, miserable one, bend down and eat.
If there are no ripe grapes on the vine,
squeeze the clusters from my firm breast;
take a pleasant kiss from me instead of the honeycomb.
Instead of the twining around tree and branches,
49
D&C 4.234–238.
50
D&C 4.246.
112 A.J. GOLDWYN
which anyone who wants to gather fruit knows,

I am the tree; come, embrace me;
you have my arms in place of branches.
I am the tree; ascend me,
harvest the fruit that is sweeter than honey.51
The imaginary beloved casts herself in antho- and dendromorphic terms,

describing herself perhaps as a garden, but perhaps also as some chimeric
or polygrafted tree composed of the best parts of many different plants
and animals that bring pleasure to her beloved: “I am the tree,” she
declares, which contains the apples, grapes, honeycombs, and roses for
which he longs. In the fantasy Charikles has spun in this dark hour, in
which he and Drosilla are slaves and she is wooed by his owner, he imag-
ines an ideal girl in an ideal garden, a girl who willingly consents to let him
be both her lover in her human aspect and her gardener in her plant
aspect.
The reality of their situation is far from the fantasy, and even once the
two are reunited,52 the issue of consent again arises; as Rhodanthe con-
tinually had to ward off the advances of her beloved, so too does Drosilla:
καὶ τῇ μελιχρότητι τῶν φιλημάτων.

Ἔφασκε καὶ γάρ. ‘ὦ Χαρίκλεις, καρδία,
τοῦ συνδυασμοῦ τῆς Δροσίλλας οὐ τύχης.
Μὴ κάμνε, μὴ βίαζε, μὴ μάτην πόνει.
ἀσχημονεῖν γὰρ σωφρονοῦσαν οὐ θέμις.’
For she said, “O Charikles, my heart,

you are not going to achieve union with Drosilla.
Do not struggle, do not force me, do not make pointless efforts;
it is not right for a girl who is chaste
to behave in an unseemly manner.”53
Charikles importunes Drosilla for sex and she, like Rhodanthe, has to use
the language of chastity to protect her from a non-consensual sexual
51
D&C 4.274–288.
52
“Καὶ συμπλακέντες τῷ μεταξὺ τῶν λόγον | ὡς κισσὸς εἰς δρῦν ἀντεφίλουν ἀσμένος”
(And embracing in the pause of her speech | like ivy clinging to an oak, they kissed each other
gladly) (D&C 7.229).
53
D&C 8.138–143.
encounter. The passage, moreover, reveals the limits of consent within the
family networks of the world of the romances:
Φιλῶ Χαρικλῆν καὶ ποθῶ πάντων πλέον.

πλὴν ὡς ἑταιρὶς οὐ προδῶ τὸ παρθένον
γνώμης τε χωρὶς μητροπατρῴοθ γένους.
I love Charikles and I desire him more than anything else,

but I will not betray my virgin state like a courtesan
without the consent of my kin, my mother and my father.54
Whether free or enslaved, whether in her father’s house or in the house of

her beloved, Drosilla’s sexuality is not her own: the social structures
erected around her virginity make her consent (and thus the freedom of
her sexual expression and satisfaction) contingent on her father, her
beloved, or the various slavers who hold her in bondage. In the end, how-
ever, the priest of Dionysos—god of grapes, vineyards, and wine—marries
the two lovers, “κλάδους παρασχὼν ἀμπέλου τοῖς ωυμφίοις” (holding out
two branches of a vine to the bridal pair).55 The metaphorical grafting of
the lovers is now made manifest in the two vines that they hold.
Their reunion as the interwoven vines offers closure to their own story,
but the novel does not end there, for the love story of their friend
Kleandros remains incomplete. Unfortunately for him, he receives news
that his beloved is in fact dead, and he laments her in typical form:
Αἲ αἴ, στένω θνήσκουσαν ὡς τρυγουμένην,

ὄμφακα βότρυν ἢ παρήμερον στάχυν
ἐν ἀγρῷ τοῦ Χάρωνος ἐχθρῷ δακτύλῳ.
Alas, alas, I mourn you who have died, as it were harvested

like an unripe grape or an immature ear of corn
in the field by Charon’s hostile fingers.56
Overcome with grief, Kleandros himself dies, and Drosilla sings his lament:
οἴχῃ πρὸ ὥρας χλωρὸς ὡραῖος στάχυς,

οὐδὲ προσειπὼν τὸν σεαυτοῦ πατέρα
54
D&C 8.144–146.
55
D&C 9.293.
56
D&C 8.218–20.
114 A.J. GOLDWYN
ἐν τῷ παραπνεῖν τὰς πνοὰς τὰς ἐσχάτας.

Ὦ κλὼν φανεὶς ὅρπηκος ἁδροῦ Λεσβίου,
ἔφυς μὲν ἁδρὸς καὶ καλὸς καὶ γλυκίων,
μικρὸν δὲ μικρὸν ὡς ἀπὸ φλογὸς ξένης
ἐπὶ φθορὰν νένευκας ἐξηραμμένος.
You have departed before your time, corn that is handsome but not yet ripe,
not even addressing your own father
as you breathed out your last breath.
O twig from a sturdy Lesbian branch,
you were born sturdy and handsome and sweet
but little by little, as if shriveled by a strange flame,
you slipped away to your destruction.57
Drosilla’s lament for Kleandros echoes his lament for his own dead
beloved: both compare the dead to the corn harvested before its time.
Drosilla elaborates on this somewhat more, describing Kleandros as a
branch broken from a strong tree.
The dendromorphic refrains in Drosilla and Charikles build on one
another, creating a cascade of echoes throughout the narrative. Indeed,
the blurring of the boundary between human and non-human is exempli-
fied in a passage later in the novel. Drosilla is in a long wagon train with
the other female slaves (Charikles and the other male slaves are forced to
march) through a particularly dense part of the forest near the sea when
she gets caught on a branch, which somehow drags her from her seat and
over the edge of a cliff. Charikles, marching separately with the male
slaves, is unaware of what has befallen her; Eugenianos notes that “ἢ γὰρ
ἑαυτὸν εὐθέως συγκρημνίσας | συνῆλθεν αὐτῇ πρὸς θαλάσσης πυθμένα”
(he would have promptly flung himself over the cliff | and joined her in the
deeps of the sea) had he known.58 But in this moment of great danger, he
does, in a certain sense, save her, for “φλοιὸν δρυὸς μήκιστον ἐξηραμμένον,
| δι’ οὗπερ εἰς γῆν ἦλθεν ἠρεμωμένην” (the long dry trunk of an oak tree
57
D&C 9.47–53. Roilos also analyzes this lament, and D&C 9.50–51 in particular, with
regard to the ways in which the lament as a whole follows the “tripartite chronological struc-
ture that adheres to the corresponding rhetorical rule of progymnasmata and monody,” but
without reference to the particular subject matter of the lament, that is, its evocation of the
natural world through the life cycles of crops and trees (95–96).
58
D&C 6.25–26.
bobbed up, |on which she floated safely).59 Long a metaphorical ivy
entwined with oak, here the hybrid plant–girl literally entwines herself
around an oak; in all the metaphorical uses of the ivy and the oak, the
emphasis is on the inability of the two to survive separately, and here this
maxim is manifested literally, as, had it not been for the oak, Drosilla
would have drowned.
When she arrives safely on shore, she sees a town in the distance.
Elizabeth Jeffreys notes that she hesitates to go in because she is a proper
Byzantine lady, but it is just as likely that she hesitates for fear of more
sexual trauma, as she has already been abducted by and had to resist the
sexual advances of first Charikles and then Kleinias.60 And, indeed, she is
eventually found by an old woman who takes her into her home, only to
find that she once again must find a way to avoid being abducted and
raped. When Kallidemos, another of her suitors, tries to convince her that
Charikles is dead and she should find another man, she tells him that she
has a headache, and begins a lament for Charikles. Kallidemos, however,
refuses to give up, and uses a dendromorphic metaphor to try and woo her:
Καὶ νῦν ἱμερτὴ σὺ τρυγᾶσθαί μοι, κόρη,

ὡς ἀκροπρέμνων ἀδροδενδροκαρπία.
ἄνοιξον οὖν μοι τὰς θύρας τοῦ κηπόυ
καὶ δὸς φαγέσθαι καὶ κορεσθῆναι μόλις.
And now, you are ripe to be harvested, girl,

like the very topmost shoot of the tree’s lusty fruit;
so open the garden’s portals for me
and allow yourself to be devoured and consumed to satiety.61
Charikles, meanwhile, is across town staying at the house of Kallidemos’

father Xenocrates, unaware that Drosilla is so close, but in the morning
hears swallows chirping and curses them:
Παύοθ, κακῶν κάκιστον ὀρνέων γένος.
59
D&C 6.19–20.
60
Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 417. See also Jouanno, who argues “Eugenianos simi-
larly emphasises Drosilla’s modesty. […] When she arrives at a village she dare not come
closer, for she is ashamed ‘to enter by herself’ (D&C 6.196)” (“Women in Byzantine
Novels,” 146).
61
D&C 6.570–573.
116 A.J. GOLDWYN
Οὐκ αὐτὸς ἐξέκοψα μίξεως φόβῳ

τὴν Φιλομήλας γλῶτταν, ὡς μή τι φράσοι.
Be quiet, most abominable species of abominable birds.

It was not I who cut out Philomela’s tongue
in fear that she should talk of her rape.62
Charikles’ thoughts, as at the beginning of the poem, turn to sexual vio-

lence and he wishes rather to sleep that he may dream of Drosilla, unaware
that she will face the very real possibility of rape that same day, for
Kallidemos,
ἀπαυθαδίσας ἐξ ἐρωτομανίας
πρὸς ἁρπαγὴν ὥρμησε λῃστρικωτέραν.
οὐκ αἰσχύνην γὰρ οἶδε πολλάκις ἔρως.
Σκοπῶν δὲ νυκτὸς ἀμφὶ τὴν ἐρημίαν
ἐπεισπεσεῖν ἄγνωστα τοῖς νεανίαις,
ἔχων σὺν αὐτῳ καὶ συνήλικας νέους,
ὡς δῆθεν αὐτὴν τῆν κόρην ἀφαρπάσων
—εἰς γᾶρ ἀπόπλουν ηὐτρέπιζεν ἁφαρπάσων.
emboldened by love madness,

he embarked on an abduction more suited to a brigand.
For love frequently knows no shame.
So he planned in the desert-wastes of night
to fall unexpectedly on the young men,
having with him comrades of his own age,
in order to abduct the girl
—for he had prepared a vessel for their departure.63
Kallidemos’ plan to abduct Drosilla, however, is unsuccessful, and she is

subsequently reunited with Charikles. At this reunion, Charikles recounts
the story of the first time he saw Drosilla and the plan he hatched to carry
her away, a story which has remarkable parallels with Kallidemos’ own:
Ἁλοὺς προσεῖπον καὶ προσειπὼν ἠξίουν

ἐμαυτὸν αὐτῇ τῇ φυγῇ συναρμόσαι.
Ἔνευσεν ἀντέρωτα πάσχουσα ξένον.
καὶ ναῦν αποπλέουσαν ἐξευρηκότες,
D&C 6.654–656.
62
D&C 7.59–66.
63
χαίρειν ἀφέντες συγγενεῖς καὶ πατρίδα

ὁμοῦ συνεισέδυμεν εἰς τὴν ὁλκάδα.
Once overcome I addressed her and, addressing her, I begged her to join
with me in flight.
She consented, for she too was experiencing a strange reciprocal love.
We found a ship about to sail off
and abandoning our parents and country,
we embarked together on the vessel.64
Kallidemos, refused marriage, attempts to kidnap Drosilla against her will;

Charikles, by contrast, becomes one of the only characters to pay explicit
attention to the issue of consent, and in this he differs even from Dosikles,
who obtained consent from Rhodanthe only after he had already kid-
napped her and taken her four days by sea to another city.
In the climactic scene of their reunion, Drosilla wonders aloud:
Τίς χερσίν, ἃς σὺ νῦν φιλεῖς καὶ κατέχεις,

τὸν φλοιὸν ἐντέθεικε καὶ δέδωκέ μοι
τοιοῦτον εὐρὺν καὶ παρεκτεταμένον,
ὡς θᾶττον εἰς γῆν ἐμωαλεῖν σεσωσμένην;
Who placed in those hands which you now kiss and embrace
that tree trunk, and gave me
such a broad and substantial log
that swiftly brought me safe to land?65
She answers her own question, arguing that it was the god Dionysos, and
then she and Charikles embrace “ὡς κισςὸς εἰς δρῦν ἀντεφίλουν ἀσμένως”
(like ivy clinging to an oak, they kissed each other gladly),66 thus re-
enacting once again the scene on the water: Charikles the oak, Drosilla the
ivy twined around it.
As the two tell of their misfortunes while apart, Charikles again begins
to see his own life reflected in the behavior of the birds. This time, how-
ever, he sees in their behavior not a warning about Drosilla’s impending
rape, but a foreshadowing of her impending marriage to him, with the
word γάμον meaning both marriage and intercourse:
64
D&C 7.144–149.
65
D&C 7.221–224.
66
D&C 7.230.
118 A.J. GOLDWYN
ὁρᾷς […] τὰ δένδρα […]

ὅσας νεοττῶν καλιὰς ὑπερφέρει.
ἐκεῖ τελεῖται στρουθίων πάντως γάμος.
παστὰς τὸ δένδρον ἐστί, νυμφὼν ὁ κλάδος,
κλίνην ἔχει δὲ τὰς ἑαυτοῦ φυλλάδας.
ναὶ καὶ τὸν ὑμέναιον ἐξᾴδει μέγα
τὰ πτηνὰ συρρέοντα τοῦ κήπου πέριξ.
Δός μοι, Δροσίλλα, καὶ σὺ σὸν σαυτῆς γάμον.
[…] You see the trees,

how many birds’ nests with their nestlings there are in them;
there regularly the sparrows celebrate their marriages; the tree is a bridal
bower, the branch the bridal chamber,
which has its leaves as the bridal couch;
yes, the great bridal hymn is sung
by the winged creatures fluttering around the garden.
Grant me, Drosilla, marriage with you.67
Hysmine and Hysminias
Eustathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias shares many of the
same concerns as the other Komnenian novels: sex, sexuality, the limits of
sexual expression, and the circumstances of consent and control. And, as
in the other novels, these issues are linked with nature: how it is cultivated
and by whom, how it is tamed and by whom, and how it is depicted liter-
ally and in metaphor in the text itself.
Thus when Hysminias wanders through his host’s garden at the open-
ing of the novel, seeing, among the cypresses, myrtles, and flowers in the
garden, that “αἱ ἄμπελοι βοστρυχοῦνται τοῖς βότρυσι” (the vines are
wreathed in grape clusters) and roses in various states of bloom,
Makrembolites establishes from the outset a certain set of genre conven-
tions and also a certain set of ideological positions.68 The owner of the
garden, Sosthenes, for instance, is a rich and successful man, and his skill
at gardening represents this goodness as well as his skill as a father: just as
he cultivates a wondrously beautiful garden, so too does he raise a
67
D&C 8.84–91.
68
H&H 1.4.1. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 217. Of particular note in this regard are
the “suggestions of sensuality” and that “wine is served at the dinners, wine which is a prod-
uct of one of the erotic plants” (Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, 99).
ondrously beautiful daughter: Hysmine.69 But Hysmine, unique among

w
all the heroines of the Byzantine novel, actually expresses her own sexual
desires before her lover. It is also a testament, however, to how strictly
guarded her expression of sexuality is that she does so in ways that Hysmine,
untutored in such things, is not able to pick up on her hints. And again, as
in the previous novels, wine is the central figure for the expression of this
sexuality, for it is as Hysmine is pouring him wine, first resting her foot
gently against his under the table, and again holding her hands on the wine
cup as he also holds it, that she first expresses her intentions.
This scene, however, also marks the very limits of the ways in which she can
express her sexuality, for when Hysminias, failing to understand the meaning
of her gesture, blurts out his confusion, her mother becomes enraged:
Πανθία πρὸς τὴν κόρην ἄγει τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς, ὅλους θυμοῦ, ὅλους ζήλου, καὶ
πλήρεις αἵματος […] καθ’ ὅλης θυμοῦται, καθ’ ὅλης ὀργίζεται. ἐρυθραίνεται
τὴν παρειάν […] ὠχριᾷ πάλιν, ὡς τοῦ παντὸς ἐρυθήματος καθ’ ὅλου τοῦ τῆς
Ὑσμίνης προσώπου καταρρυέντος
Panthia turns her eyes on the girl, eyes which are full of fury, full of wrath
and full of blood […] she is utterly furious and utterly enraged with her, and
her cheeks grow red, […] but she soon grows pale as if the blushes are drain-
ing away to Hysmine’s face.70
At first her mother becomes angry, thinking that her daughter has
failed in the basic practicalities of serving wine to an honored guest; seeing
the redness rise in Hysmine’s face, however, her own becomes pale, real-
izing something far worse: Hysmine had not made a mistake at all, but
rather was actively expressing sexual interest in Hysminias. Sosthenes is
equally enraged, and “δριμὺ πρὸς τὴν παρθένον ἰδὼν […] καὶ αὐτὸς καὶ
κινήσας τὴν κεφαλὴν ἐκεῖθεν” (looks sharply at his daughter […] shaking
his head).71 Hysmine is under constant and strict surveillance from her
parents; any attempt to express her sexuality is met with strong rebuke.
69
Jeffreys notes the parallel between Hysmine and the garden: “The garden with its pro-
tective walls and abundant fertility can perhaps be taken to stand for the protected chastity of
its maiden owner” (Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 179), with citations for relevant litera-
ture. I would only quibble that the garden does not represent the maiden’s chastity, but
rather the maiden herself. Nilsson suggests that “Hysmine is connected with the garden both
explicitly and in interlocking words or imagery” (Erotic Pathos, 99).
70
H&H 1.10.1.
71
H&H 1.10.2.
120 A.J. GOLDWYN
Later, after the rudiments of love have been explained to Hysminias and
he commits himself to falling in love with Hysmine, he falls asleep and, in
his dream, this commitment to her is made, again, through wine: he dreams
that he is at another banquet and that this time “πρὸς ἐμὲ δ’ ἧκεν ἡ κόρη
κιρωῶσα, καὶ ὅλην αὐτὴν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς μου κατέπινον, ὅλην ἐξερρόφουν,
ὅλην πρὸς τὴν ψυχὴν ἐπεβίβαζον” (the girl came towards me, mixing the
wine, and I drank her down completely with my eyes and I quaffed the girl
entirely, and I took her into my soul).72 In his dream, the synthesis of girl
and wine is complete: he drinks her as though she were the wine itself.
Following this wine drinking in the dream, Hysminias has an explicit
rape fantasy about Hysminias: “ἣν μηδὲν αἰδεσθεὶς ὅλαις ἐφέλκομαι ταῖς
χερσί, καὶ τῇ κλίνῃ παρακθίζω […]. Ἡ δ’ αἰδεῖται μὲν ὡς παρθένος καὶ τὴν
μὴ πειθομένην τὰ πρῶτα καθυποκρίνεται, νικᾶται δ’ ὅμως ὡς παρθένος
ἀνδρός” (“without the least shame I draw her by the hand and sit her
beside me on the bed. […] but the girl being a virgin, is abashed, and at
first pretends to be reluctant but finally is overcome, as happens to a virgin
when with a man”).73 After a long description of her physique and fea-
tures, the violence of their sexual encounter increases:
Ἅπτομαι τῆς χειρός, ἡ δ’ ἐπιχειρεῖ συνάγειν ταύτην καὶ περικαλλύπτειν εἰς

το χιτώνιον. ἀλλ’ ὅμως κἀν τούτῳ ωικῶ. Ἐφέλκομαι ταύτην περὶ τὸ χεῖλος,
καταφιλῶ καταδάκνω πυκνά. ἡ δ’ ἀντεφέλκεται καὶ ὅλη συτέλλεται.
Περιπτύσσομαι καὶ τὸν τράχηλον καὶ τὰ χείλη τοῖς χείλεσιν ἐπιτίθημι καὶ
φιλημάτων πληρῶ καὶ καταστάζω τὸν ἔρωτα. Ἡ δ’ ὑποπλαττομένη συνάγειν
αὐτὰ δάκνει του τὸ χεῖλος ἐρωτικῶς καὶ ὑποκλέπτει το φίλημα.
I touch her hand and, although she tries to withdraw it and conceal it in her
tunic, nevertheless I prevail. I draw it up to my lips, I kiss it, I nibble it inces-
santly; she pulls away and curls up on herself. I clasp her neck and set my lips
on hers and fill her with kisses and exude passion. She pretends to withdraw
her lips but bites my lip passionately and steals a kiss.74
Despite these overt signs of resistance, and despite the fact that Hysminias,
just the day before, had been so unfamiliar with the conventional expres-
sions of love that he was unaware of her subtly flirtatious hints, he is now
able to discern when her attempt to withdraw from a kiss is pretend and
when it is a serious withholding of consent, especially when he is already
holding her by the neck.
72
H&H 3.5.2.
73
H&H 3.5.7. The scene is discussed in MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides, 138.
74
H&H 3.7.1.
Hysmine’s resistance increases in line with Hysminias’ aggressiveness:
Γίνομαι καὶ περὶ τὸ στέρνον τῆς κόρης. ἡ δ’ ἀντέχεται μάλα γενναίως καὶ ὅλη
συτέλλεται καὶ ὅλῳ σώματι περιτειχίζει τὸν μαστὸν ὡς πόλις ἀκρόπολιν, καὶ
χερσὶ καὶ τραχήλῳ καὶ πώγωνι καὶ γαστρὶ τοὺς μαστοὺς καταφράττει καὶ
περιφράττει. καὶ κάτωθεν μὲν ἀνέχει τὰ γόνατα, ὡς ἐξ ἀκροπόλεως δὲ τῆς
κεφαλῆς ἀκροβολίζει τὸ δάκρυον
Then I find myself at the girl’s chest; she puts up a stout resistance, curls up
completely and defends her breast with her entire body, as a city defends a
citadel, and fortifies and barricades her breasts with her hands and neck and
fists and belly; and further down she raises her knees as she shoots off a
stream from the citadel of her head.75
The metaphorical language connects the sacking of cities with the rap-
ing of women: both are well defended, and the entrance into and perfor-
mance of masculinity require the language of unwilling conquest over
both. The image of Hysminias is of a woman attempting to fight off a
violent sexual assault: she is curled up, her knees raised, and she is using
her hands and fists to fight him off, all the while crying. This, however,
does not deter Hysminias; rather, he interprets this behavior as actually
inviting further sexual contact; he interprets these defensive postures as
her “μονονοὺ λέγουσα ‘ἢ φιλῶν μαλαχθῇ μου τοῖς δάκρυσιν ἢ μὴ φιλῶν
ὀκνήσει τὸν πόλεμον’” (all but saying, “Either he loves me and will be
softened by my tears, or he doesn’t love me and will shrink from battle”).76
From Hysminias’ perspective, her withholding of consent and her attempts
to ward him off are a test of his manhood; he imagines that she will inter-
pret his respect of her refusal to have sex as a sign that he doesn’t love her:
“Ἐγὼ δὲ τὴν ἧτταν αἰδούμενος ἀντέχομαι βιαιότερον καὶ μόλις νικῶ, καὶ
νικῶν ἡττῶμαι καὶ ὅλος ἀμβλύνομαι. Ἅμα γὰρ ἡ χεὶρ περὶ τὸν τῆς κόρης
μαστόν, καὶ χαυνότης ὅλη περὶ τὴν ἐμὴν καρδίαν ἐπέρρευσεν” (I am rather
ashamed to be defeated and so I persist more violently and at length I am
almost victorious but find defeat in my victory and am utterly undone. For
the moment my hand got to the girl’s breast lassitude invaded my heart).77
Her resistance does not make him pause and consider the effect his actions
may be having on her; rather, he is unable to distinguish between consen-
75
H&H 3.7.3.
76
H&H 3.7.3.
77
H&H 3.7.5.
122 A.J. GOLDWYN
sual sex and rape; her tears spur him to more violent actions. The more
violent he is, the more aroused he becomes, and touching her breast
causes him to orgasm.78 Immediately after this, “Ἐυθὺς οὖν ἐξέπτη μου
τῶν χειρῶν ἡ κόρη” (the girl slips out of my hands), such that the last
thing he experiences in the dream is her escape from him, which she effects
the moment he relaxes his grip on her.79
Indeed, even in reality, the issue of consent and force comes to the fore
repeatedly, as Hysmine and Hysminias meet over a series of days in the
garden. Having greeted her by pulling on her tunic, he notes that “ἡ δ’
ἐσίγα τὰ πρῶτα καὶ μόνον ἀντέτεινεν” (she was silent at first and her only
reaction was to resist)80 and, when he kisses her hand, she reiterates her
objection, “τὴν χεῖρ’ ἀφαρπάξασα μακρὰν ἀπεπήδηεσεν” (snatching her
hand away, [she] ran off).81 A short time later, he again sees Hysmine in
the garden and runs to her. He kisses her and she bites his lip to indicate
her displeasure with his behavior, and again he infuses his threats of sexual
coercion with the language of the conquest of nature:
‘Εἰ δέ μοι κέντρον φέρεις ὡς μέλιττα και φυλάττεις τὸ σίμβλον καὶ πλήττεις
τὸν τοῦ μέλιτος τρυγητήν, ἐγκαρτερήσω τῷ σίμβλῳ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ κέντρου
πόνον ὑφέξω καὶ τρυγήσω τοῦ μέλιτος. οὐ γάρ με στερήσει πόνος γλυκύτητος
μέλιτος, ὥσπερ οὐδ’ ἄκανθα ῥόδου τοῦ ῥόδου κωλύσει με.’ Καὶ πάλιν ἐφίλουν
αὐτὴν καὶ πάλιν συνέθλιβον καὶ τι δρᾶν ἐπεχείρουν ἐρωτικώτερον. ἡ δ’ ‘ἀλλ’
οὐκ ἔσται σοι τοῦτο, νὴ τὴν Ὑσμίνην’ ἔλεγεν. ἐγὼ δ’ ‘οὐκ ἀνήσω, νὴ τὸν
Ὑσμινίαν’ αντέλεγον.
“If you are waving a sting at me like a bee and are guarding your hive and
are lashing out at the honey thief, I will take over the hive, put up with the
pain from the sting and harvest the honey. For the pain will not deprive me
of the honey’s sweetness, as the rose’s thorns do not turn me away from the
rose.” And so I kissed her once more and I made a more amorous advance.
“By Hysmine,” she said, “you won’t get anywhere with that.” “By
Hysminias,” said I, “I’m not going to give up.”82
78
For this scene in the context of Hysminias’ other dreams, see Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, 107
and, more recently, Nilsson, “To Touch or Not to Touch,” 248–255.
79
H&H 3.7.7.
80
H&H 4.3.2.
81
H&H 4.3.4.
82
H&H 4.22.3.
Hysminias once again ignores Hysminias’ withholding of consent, even

going so far as to tell her, after she tells him to stop, that he won’t give up,
and indeed, he proceeds to have sex with her anyway despite her contin-
ued resistance and tears—“Ἡ δ’ ὅλας πηγὰς δακρύων ἐκ τῶν τῆς κόρης
ὀφθαλμῶν ἀνεστόμωσεν” (Modesty poured out fountains of tears from
the girl’s eyes);83 her consent means little to him. Indeed, “Σωφροσύνην
Ἔρως ἐκράτησεν ἄν, εἰ μὴ τις περί τὴν πύλην γενόμενος (τῆς δυστυχίας)”
(Eros would have conquered Chastity had not someone appeared at the
gate—what an unlucky chance!).84 What to Hysminias is an unlucky
chance in a struggle between Modesty and Chastity is, to Hysmine, some-
thing perhaps much different: a chance intervention that averted her being
raped by a man she perhaps loved but whom she had nevertheless consis-
tently told in word and shown in deed that she did not consent to his
aggressive sexual advances. Ultimately, as the romances were written by
men and often narrated by the men within the story, the true interiority of
the women experiencing these advances remains unknowable.
Hysmine once again proves incapable of conceiving of non-coercive
sexuality in yet another dream set in the garden: “κἀγὼ τὴν παρθένον
ἐφέλκομαι τὰ πρῶτα μὴ θέλουσαν, συνέχω, θλίβω, δάκνω, φιλῶ,
περιπλέκομαι, καὶ τι δρᾷν ἐθέλων ἐρωτικώτερον οὐ συνεχωρούμην τῇ κόρῃ
καὶ πρὸς ἔριν μετάγω τὸν ἔρωτα” (I draw the maiden to me, at first against
her will; but I continue, I hold her, I nibble at her, I kiss her, I embrace her
but when I try to become even more passionate the girl would not allow
me and I turn passion into conflict).85 As in reality, the attempted rape in
the dream is also averted by the timely arrival of a third party, though this
time it is the girl’s mother, who “τοῦ πλοκάμου λαβομένη τὴν κόρην ὥς ἐκ
λείας ἐφέλκεται λάφυρον” (grasping the girl by the hair, drags her off like
loot from war-spoils) and hurls insults at Hysminias, calling him “μοιχός,
ἀκόλαστος, βιαστής” (a fornicator, unregenerate, a rapist) who “δεύτερος
Πάρις εἰς Αὐλικώμιδα κατασυλᾷ μου τὸν θησαυρόν, ἀνορύττει μου τὸ
κειμήλιον” (has come to Aulikomis as a second Paris; he ravages my trea-
sure, he robs me of my heirloom).86 Whether in Hysminias’ fantasies or
nightmares, in dream or in reality, Hysmine is always the subject of vio-
lence; sometimes by him, other times by her parents. There is no situation
83
H&H 4.23.2.
84
H&H 4.23.3.
85
H&H 5.3.2.
86
H&H 5.3.5.
124 A.J. GOLDWYN
in which Hysmine’s consent is taken into account, and no situation in

which she avoids the violence that comes from either having or resisting
non-consensual sex.
Shortly thereafter, he again attempts to force himself on Hysmine,
sneaking into her chamber at night in order to take her virginity. He
describes their sexual encounter in gustatory and horticultural terms:
Ὅλην ἀνεπλεκόμην τὴν κόρην ὡς ἄμπελον, καὸ τὺς ὀμφακίζοντας τῶν

βοτρύων ἐκθλίβων τῷ στόματι νέκταρ ἐξεφερρόφον τοῖς χείλεσιν, οἷον
ἀποθλίβουσιν ἔρωτες. καὶ τοῖς δακτύλοις ἀπέθλιβον καὶ τοῖς χείλεσιν ἔπινον,
ἵνα τὸ πᾶν ὡς εἰς πίθον ψυχὴν τὴν ἐμὴν ἐκθλιβῇ μοι τοῦ νέκταρος. οὕτως
ἀκόρεστος ἐγὼ τρυγητής. ἡ δ’ ἀντεφίλει καὶ κατεφίλει με καὶ κατὰ κιττὸν
ἀνεπλέκετο.
I entwined myself around the girl entirely, like a vine, and I pressed the
unripe grape clusters to my mouth and quaffed with my lips the nectar
which the Erotes were squeezing out; and I pressed with my fingers and
drank with my lips so that all the nectar could be squeezed out for me into
the vat that was my soul—such an insatiable vintner was I. She kissed me in
return and embraced me and entwined herself round me like ivy.87
Hysminias and Hysmine are both grafted plant—vines wrapping around

one another—and also gardener and gardened, or in this case, vintner and
vine. Hysminias views Hysmine as an object to be consumed, to be used
to satisfy his own appetites. Hysmine, however, resists, casting herself as
yet unripe; she says to him: “φεῖσαι παρθενίας ἐμῆς. μὴ πρὸ τοῦ θέρους
ἐκτίλῃς τοὺς στάχυνας. μὴ τὸ ῥόδον τρυγήςῃς προ τοῦ προκύψαι τῆς
κάλυκος, μὴ τὴν σταφυλὴν ὀμφακίζουσαν, μή πως ἀντὶ νέκταρος ὄξος
ἐκθλίξῃς ἐξ ὄμφακος” (Spare my virginity; do not reap the ears of corn
before the summer; do not pluck the rose before it bursts from its sheath;
do not crush the ripening grape lest you press out vinegar from the cluster
instead of nectar).88 In response to his overtures, she falls back on horti-
cultural imagery to tell him to be patient: reaping corn before it is ripe,
roses before they are in bloom, grapes not yet sweetened. She continues
by reassuring him that he will be ultimately successful if only he waits: “Σὺ
θερίσεις τὸ ἄσταχυν, ἀλλ’ ὅταν λευκανθῇ σοι τὸ λήιον. σὺ τὴν ῥοδωνιὰν
H&H 5.16.3.
87
H&H 5.17.1. For a discussion of this passage, see Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, 115 and
88
114–117 for a broader discussion of Hysmine and flower imagery.

ἀνανθίσεις, ἀλλ’ ὅταν πεπανθὲν τὸ ῥόδον προκύψῃ τῆς κάλυκος. σὺ

τρυγήσεις τὴν σταφυλήν, ἀλλ’ ὅταν τὸν βότρυν ἴδῃς ὑπερπερκάσαντα”
(You will reap the ears, but when the field is white for harvest; you will cull
the rose, but when the mature bloom bursts from the sheath; you will
harvest the grape, but when you see the clusters ripened).89 In rebuffing
Hysminias again, she draws on the gardening metaphor that was estab-
lished at the very outset of the work and reinforced throughout.90
Indeed, ironically, it is only an act of violence and degradation against
Hysmine that prevents her from becoming subject to even greater vio-
lence and degradation. Encountering a storm at sea, the lovers, in flight
from her parents, encounter a storm, and the sailors decide to throw her
overboard as a human sacrifice to calm the storm: “Τοίνυν ἀποσπᾶταί μου
τῶν χειρῶν ἡ παρθένος, ἀποδύεται τὸν χιτῶνα καὶ ταῖς τοῦ κυβερνήτου
χερσὶ γυμνὴ παρατίθεται […] τῆς νεὼς τὴν κόρην ἐξεσφενδόνησε” (so the
maiden is torn from my hands, stripped of her tunic and thrust naked into
the helmsman’s hands. […] He hurled the girl from the ship).91 But upon
arriving on shore, they are overrun and enslaved by Ethiopians “ἁρπάζομτες
ὡς θῆρες ἀγρίως” (making a savage onslaught like wild beasts).92 After
stripping both male and female captives naked, the men are murdered or
forced into labor at the oars, while “τὰς δέ γε γυναῖκας αἰσχύνη καὶ
βαρβαρική τις ἀσέλγεια” (the barbarians’ immorality and licentiousness
was reserved for the women),93 the serial rape of whom is mentioned four
times more.94 The maidens who are spared this fate, by contrast, are made
89
H&H 5.17.2.
90
Hysmine again rebuffs Hysminias’ advances later, and when she does, he asks: “Τί γοῦν
μὴ τὸν βότρυν τρυγῶ πεπανθέντα καὶ ὅλον ὑπερπερκάσαντα; Τί μὴ τὸν στάχυν θερίζω
κεκυφότα πρὸς γῆν;” (So why do I not pluck the grape that is ripe and brimming with juice?
Why do I not harvest the corn that is bowed down to the ground?) (H&H 7.4.1).
91
H&H 7.15.1.
92
H&H 8.2.1.
93
H&H 8.3.2.
94
“Οὕτω τοίνυν τὰ μὲν περί τὰς γυναῖκας αἰσχρως” (While these shameful things were hap-
pening to the women) (H&H 8.4.1); “αἱ δέ γε γυναῖκς αἰσχρῶς τοῖς βαρβαροῖς
συνανεκλίθησαν. καὶ ἦν ἡ τριήρης πανδοχεῖον πλῆρες αἰσχρότητος καὶ συμπόσιον αὅματος”
(the women lay shamelessly with the barbarians, and the trireme became a brothel full of
turpitude and a symposium of blood) (H&H 8.4.3). Hysmine then again references “ὅσα
ταῖς γυναιξίν ἠναιδεύετο” (all their disgraceful behaviour towards the women) (H&H 8.6.1).
Three days later, they put in to shore again and after “καὶ τἆλλα ὁπόσα βαρβαρικῶς ἀσμένως
ταῖς γυναιξὶ κατεχρήσατο, σὺν αὐταῖς γυναιξὶ πρὸς ὕπνον ἐτράπη τὸ βάρβαρον, ὅλαις ἡδοναῖς
καταβαπτισθὲν τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ ὅλοις καταμεθύσαν τοῖς ἔρωσιν” (all the other disgraceful
126 A.J. GOLDWYN
subject to a virginity test that results in either serial rape by their captors
or being sold as sex slaves elsewhere: “καὶ ὅσον μὲν οὐ κατέδυ τὴν κεφακήν,
ὅσον οὐκ ἀφῃρέθη τὸν στέφανον, ἠργυρολογήθη πολλοῦδδδδδ ὅσον δὲ τὴν
παρθενίαν κατέπψευστο, τὴν τριήρη κατεκληρώσατο καὶ ταῖς γυναιξὶ
συνηρίθμητο, καὶ χρυσοῦ ψαλκὸν ἀντηλλάξατο, τοῦ τῆς δάφνης παρθενικοῦ
στεφάνου παστάδα βαρβαρικήν” (All who did not dip their heads and who
did not lose their garlands [in the water virginity test] were sold for a high
price; all whose claim of virginity was false were allotted to the trireme and
classed with the women, receiving bronze in place of the gold, and a bar-
barian bridal chamber in place of the virgin’s laurel wreath).95
Burton argues that, unlike the other two novels, Hysmine and Hysminias
“does not explicitly include the theme of a hero’s forcible, non-consensual
abduction of a heroine” and that “the relationship between this hero and
heroine […] is consensual from the start.”96 The modes of consent within
this novel are, however, not so simple. On the one hand, Hysmine initiates
the romance through her overt if subtle indications to Hysminias. On the
other hand, he not only repeatedly ignores her pleas that they not have
sex, he is also seemingly incapable of developing a fantasy and dream-life
in which he can conceive of sexual pleasure in situations of mutual
consent.
Ecofeminist Narratology in the Medieval

Romance East and West
These issues of consent are complicated by the narratological context in
which they appear. In her discussion of Digenis Akritis, Megan Moore
asks: “If women are continually the subject of men’s domination in the
romance, whether through ravishment redeemed by marriage, or through
the continual threat of rape that is living on a warrior frontier, then in what
ways is it possible to posit their subjectivity?”97 She suggests that “rapt has
a complex relationship to agency, one that turns around the articulation of
activities to which they subjected the women, the barbarians disposed themselves for sleep
with the women, immersing their souls completely in pleasure and entirely intoxicated with
their passions) (8.8.2). Such is the extent to which Makrembolites is unable to narrate from
a female perspective that even rape is narrated from the perspective of barbarian men: the
focus is on their pleasure and passions, not on the terror and agony of the women.
95
H&H 8.7.6.
96
97
women’s desire,” that, in Digenis, “the kidnapping is consensual,” and

that “the formulation of rapt […] permits a space for imagining women’s
personal desires (their cross-cultural love) to have political consequences
for both their families and their empires.”98 The underlying and pervasive
threat of violence from both fathers and prospective husbands complicates
any reading of women’s consent in the romance,99 and this object status is
represented in their narratological disenfranchisement as well.
The lack of female narration and the consequences of this silencing
both for women as theoretical subjects and for their embodied experience
of physical pain and mental anguish has become the focus of recent schol-
arship on the Canterbury Tales. Reference again to The Knight’s Tale can
offer a theoretical model for an ecofeminist narratology that gives voice to
these silenced or unspeaking beings.100 Jamie Friedman calls Emelye
“arguably the most silent female character in any of the Canterbury Tales,”
and one who, moreover, “has little room to speak about her own con-
sciousness, identity, or desires, all elements to which readers might point
when looking for evidence of her interior life. […] Critical readings posit
Emelye as variously absent, trite, ideal, or symbolic, but never as a subject
with her own interiority.”101 Friedman argues that where Emelye does
speak, she presents a figure who is “unruly, powerful, and resistant” and
thus
her articulation of that autonomous inner life threatens the precarious mas-
culine dominance in the tale. […] In response to this threat, Emelye’s inte-
98
Moore, Exchanges in Exoticism, 38–39.
99
Moore herself stresses that “women are constantly the subject of rape and physical vio-
lence throughout Digenis” (Moore, Exchanges in Exoticism, 39).
100
Caroline Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, and in particular the chapter “Reading
Like a Man,” complicates this picture. While agreeing with the general principle that male
narrators and male readers marginalize women’s experiences and voices in texts, Dinshaw
nevertheless sees Chaucer as an exception to this rule, suggesting that “the very denaturaliza-
tion of the masculine perspective becomes something of a structural principle in Chaucer’s
later poetic projects. In the Canterbury Tales […] he speaks in the voices of others, in the
voices of sometimes ostentatiously gendered characters, and, further, he shows the costs, the
risks, the personal and political stakes involved in the deliberate assumption of a gendered
voice” (29). The debate over Chaucer’s dissident sympathies and progressive politics has
been heated and inconclusive; nevertheless, the narratological principle of silencing female
voices remains a fundamental aspect of medieval literature, even if Chaucer may be excep-
tional in this regard.
101
Friedman, “Between Boccaccio and Chaucer,” 203.
128 A.J. GOLDWYN
riority must be vacated—voided of its presence and ability to speak about

itself—so that Emelye’s body might continue to serve as the terrain across
which men in the tale communicate and legitimate homosocial culture. It is
the particularly violent male gaze upon Emelye’s body that attempts to
empty her body of its potent interiority and to reappropriate her body for
use as the symbolic and erotic goal of the romance in which she figures.102
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen sees in this a pattern repeated throughout the

Canterbury Tales; he summarizes The Reeve’s Tale as
the story of a miller who fleeces his customers. John and Aleyn are forced to
purchase from the miller a breakfast baked from flour he stole from them.
The clerks believe the proper payment for such abuse is to be made through
the sexual enjoyment of the women in his household. Once they sleep with
the wife and daughter, the tale becomes a disturbing account of what hap-
pens when all the world is reduced to an economy of sale. […] The narrative
economics of the Miller’s Tale renders even rape a clever trick, a joke.
Women’s bodies are used by men to send messages to other men.103
After this description of the instrumental use of male violence towards

women as a means of recuperating a masculine identity threatened by
being bested financially, Cohen notes: “That these women have their own
stories is hinted at but never with much narrative attention explored.”104
Masculinity, then, is constructed through aestheticized violence on
the female body, through female objectification, and through the silenc-
ing of those women.105 So too with Digenis and the Komnenian novels,
tales written by men, narrated by men (both the implied authors and the
male protagonists themselves), which base their ideas of masculinity on
102
Friedman, “Between Boccaccio and Chaucer,” 204.
103
Cohen, “Posthuman Environs,” 39.
104
Cohen, “Posthuman Environs,” 39.
105
Challenging the reading of rape as a purely literary or symbolic function in texts,
Dinshaw argues that the real-life rape accusations against Chaucer “reminds us that there are
not only figurative rapes—the writer’s intent raped by the scribe’s pen, the text as woman’s
body violated by the interpenetrations of literary and exegetical tradition—and there are not
only fictional rapes […] but there are real rapes as well. It forces us, first of all, to face the
literal reality that such a metaphorical identification can obscure, and it keeps in front of us
the difference between literary activity and sexual violation. To equate reading with rape
would be to underestimate drastically the transgressive reality of rape [… and] to consider
causal relationships between gendered representation and actual social relations between
men and women” (Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 11).
dominance over women, nature, and animals. In this regard, the zoomor-
phication and anthomorphication of Emelye has narrative consequences
as well, since these, too, are the other classes of living beings that are
unable to speak for themselves. Applying a similar frame of reference for
the violent silencing of animals and the aestheticizing of their physical
suffering and death, Philip Armstrong posits a new paradigm for thinking
about the silenced “postcolonial animal,” arguing that “encountering the
postcolonial animal means learning to listen to the voices of all kinds of
‘other’ without either ventriloquizing them or assigning them accents so
foreign that they can never be understood.”106 An ecofeminist narratol-
ogy, then, would attempt to understand these marginalized beings as
subjects within narratives that make them objects or, barring that,
acknowledge the interpretive limits for such an understanding in texts
that instantiate patriarchal values through androcentric narrativity.
This is particularly consequential when dealing with issues of women’s
consent in the Komnenian novels. Prodromos, Eugenianos, and
Makrembolites were all men, and the narratives are often recounted in the
first-person voice of the male heroes themselves.107 Corinne Jouanno
notes that
whereas Dosikles’ speeches amount to around 1160 lines, Charikles’ to

1043 and Hysminas’ to 520 (within the first person narrative), Rhodanthe’s
direct addresses cover no more than 376 lines, Drosilla’s 393 and Hysmine’s
190. And in Prodromos’ and Eugenianos’ novels, even if we do not take the
heroes’ retrospective narrative into account, the disproportion between the
106
Armstrong, “The Postcolonial Animal,” 417.
107
Katharine Haynes discusses similar issues in the ancient novel. She explores the limits of
Elaine Showalter’s argument that “any focus on male images of women ignores […] what
women have actually felt and experienced” (Fashioning the Feminine, 11). For Haynes, the
problem with conceiving of “male-authored texts [as] useless for identifying a ‘female experi-
ence’” is that “for the Classical world, the majority of accounts that we possess which may
relate to the female experience are male authored,” and thus a rejection of them “dismisses
most of Classical literature at one stroke” (12). She positions Alice Jardine’s work on “gyne-
sis” as an oppositional model that “focus[es] on what has been left out of, or denied empha-
sis in, the great Western master narratives” (12). This method of criticism “demands a
sensitivity in reading male authored texts, encouraging the critic to focus on language and its
ambiguity […] Marginalized characters must be allowed to speak; the throwaway lines and
throwaway characters examined for their implicit assumptions” (Fashioning the Feminine,
13).
130 A.J. GOLDWYN
sexes remains important, with 540 lines to Dosikles and 347 to Rhodanthe,
611 lines to Charikles and 393 to Drosilla.108
Jouanno connects this taciturnity with the authors’ “ideal of virginal mod-
esty,” which “repeatedly lays stress on the reserve their heroines observe in
conversation,” but it is as much an issue of narratology as of gendered
cultural norms.109 Narrative by male authors and male narrators obscures
female voices, imputes to women’s actions and words men’s ideological
preoccupations, and makes it impossible to see women’s perspectives on
events, since even those events narrated by women are filtered through
male narrators and writers;110 Charles Barber notes that “the woman is
always presented through the medium of the male narrator. It is Hysminias’
description of Hysmine that we have.”111 Ultimately, the minds of the
women in the Byzantine romances are unknowable, and the women them-
selves are not considered individuated autonomous agents in their own
lives (or in the narratives about those lives); Digenis Akritis takes this to
such an extreme that neither Digenis’ wife nor his mother are even given
names, a profound act of narratological dehumanization.112
This indifference to female subjectivity and narrativity is particularly
true in the case of sexual pleasure, which the men indulge in, sometimes
with great narrative detail, while the women’s sexual experiences are
negated. This is part and parcel of a patriarchal narrative that denies
women the opportunity to speak for themselves and to feel either pleasure
or pain. Hysminias’ sexual experiences, his feelings of sexual pleasure and
climax, are narrated in great detail, while Hysmine’s are not mentioned at
all. Indeed, for all the focus on female consent, female pleasure is equally
obscured. Rhodanthe and Dosikles ends with “ἔγνω Δοσικλῆν ἡ Ῥοδάνθη
νυμφίον” (Rhodanthe had full knowledge of her bridegroom Dosikles),
108
109
110
Moore notes that “the mothers are active letter writers” (Exchanges in Exoticism, 38).
111
Barber, “Reading the Garden,” 16. About the elaborate ekphrases that often depict
women as statues or paintings, he writes: “The comparison to a work of art effectively
silences them” (17).
112
Barber notes that “in Digenes the object of the hero’s attention is simply referred to as
The Girl” (“Reading the Garden,” 17). See, too, the ways in which women’s names are nar-
rated in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, as, for instance, in the Knight of the Cart,
wherein Lancelot’s name is withheld for purposes of narrative suspense, while Meleagant’s
sister—who plays a crucial role in the romance—is never named at all.
while Drosilla and Charikles ends with “ἐν ἑσπέρᾳ μένουσα παρθένος κόρη
| γυνὴ πρὸς ὄρθρον ἐξανέστη τῆς κλίνης” (and the girl who in the evening
was a virgin, | arose from her bed in the morning a woman).113 In neither
of these cases is there an attempt to explore the sexual experiences of
women at all, much less on a par with those of men.
The links between the development of romance in the Western and
Eastern halves of the former Roman Empire have been the subject of
much scholarship; indeed, the cultural links between the two are axiomatic
in Byzantine literature, as epitomized by Roderick Beaton, who argued in
one of the first studies of the medieval Greek romance that “specific paral-
lels between literary developments in Byzantium and in the west in the
twelfth century are tantalizing but cannot in the present state of our
knowledge be ascribed to direct influence in one direction or the other.”114
Indeed, because of this simultaneous rise and the transnational nature of
the romances, the study of this genre has done much to shape scholarly
understanding of East–West interaction more generally.115 These studies,
however, have generally been historical, philological, or linguistic,116 rather
than purely literary. In her analysis of female initiation and erotic dreams
in Livistros and Rodamni and the Italian Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
(1499), however, Efthymia Priki identifies parallel structural motifs as the
couples fall in love. Significantly, she identifies the silencing of women and
the prioritization of the male experience in the Greek narrative117 even as,
in the Italian, the heroine Polia is allowed her own subjective experience
113
R&D 9.486; D&C 9.299–300.
114
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 19. Beaton adds much to his discussion of these
subjects in the afterword to the second edition. For more recent discussions of the relation-
ship between Byzantium and the West, see, for instance, Yiavis, “Adaptations of Western
Sources” and Yiavis, “‘Originals’ and ‘Adaptations’: Revisiting Categories in Late Byzantine
Romance.” For an account of the rise of romance as the result of cultural contact between
Byzantium and the Latin West during the Crusades, see Heng, Empire of Magic, among
numerous others.
115
And, indeed, is reshaping the definition of East–West, which once referred to Byzantium
and Western Europe, but is now being reconfigured with Byzantium as the West and the
Arab and Turkish states as the East, as, for instance, in Rubanovich, “In the Mood of Love,”
Rubanovich, “A Hero Without Borders,” and Krönung, “The Wisdom of the Beasts.”
116
See, for instance, Markopoulos, “Linguistic Contacts in the Late Byzantine Romances.”
117
“Throughout the dream Rodamni remains silent and her reactions are not recorded—
she is only presented as the object of desire, Eros’ gift to Livistros. This comes as no surprise
since this is Livistros’ dream, which he saw before meeting with Rodamni in his waking life.”
Priki, “Eros the Executioner,” n.p. (forthcoming).
132 A.J. GOLDWYN
of love. The experience, however, is not a pleasant one. She resists the
advances of her suitor Poliphilo, who “repeats his invocation to Cupid,
calling him to punish her disobedience and cruelty” for not falling in love
with him.118 In a series of nightmares immediately thereafter, Polia first
sees her body torn apart by wild animals, then “sees two vile executioners
(399 [B5r]: dui horribili carnifici) of grotesque and terrifying appearance
violating her closed and locked bedroom and attacking her, speaking in
terrible voices and accusing her of disobedience. […] Given their associa-
tion with the gods of love, then, they appear to visit Polia as Cupid’s
henchmen, carrying out his will.”119 Priki concludes that “the framing of
the women’s experience within the male initiation narratives should make
us suspicious as to the actual presence of a female perspective on the love
story. So, to be more precise, we could say that the passages discussed here
demonstrate how men experience love and how men perceive women’s
experience of love.”120 The same problems of female (sexual) agency, nar-
rativity, and consent and coercion, then, exist across the linguistic divide
of Greek and Western medieval romances. In Livistros, the male perspec-
tive is prioritized and female experiences are omitted, thus allowing the
scene to be narrated in a way that foregrounds the male experience with-
out having to explore the corollary psychological, emotional, and often
physical trauma experienced by women that makes such experiences plea-
surable for men.
Indeed, the silencing of women’s experiences is particularly pronounced
in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. In the iconic sex scene of Chrétien
de Troyes’ (and perhaps the entire Old French romance) corpus, Lancelot
and Guinevere, separated by many painful obstacles, finally make love in
Le Chevalier de la Charrette:
Or a Lanceloz quan qu’il vialt

Quant la reïne an gré requialt
Sa conpaignie et son solaz,
Quant il la tient antre ses braz
Et ele lui antre les suens.
Tant li est ses jeus dolz et buens,
Et del beisier, et del santir,
Que il lor avint sanz mantir
118
119
120
Une joie et une mervoille

Tel c’onques ancor sa paroille
Ne aïe ne seüe.121
[…]
Malt ot de joie et de deduit
Lanceloz, tote cele nuit.
Mez li jorz vient qui malt li grieve,
Quant de lez s’amie se lieve.
Au lever fu il droiz martirs,
Tant li griés li departirs,
Car il i suefre grant martire.
Ses cuers adés cele part tire
Ou la reïne se remaint.
N’a pooir que il l’an remaint,
Que la reïne tant li plest
Qu’il n’a talant que il la lest:
Li cors s’an vet, li cuers sejorne.
Now Lancelot had all he desired. The queen eagerly sought his company
and his pleasure as he held her in his arms and she held him in hers. In the
pleasure of loving, he tasted such rapturous happiness by kissing and caress-
ing her that theirs was, without word of lie, a wondrous joy, whose equal has
never yet been heard or known. […] All night long Lancelot enjoyed great
pleasure. But the days’ approach pained him deeply since he had to rise form
his beloved’s side. Rising made him feel like a martyr, for he suffered the
agony of martyrdom in the torture of departure. His heart was persistent in
staying with the queen. He could not lead it away, for it knew such pleasure
with the queen that it had no desire to leave her. His body departed; his
heart remained.122
Though Lancelot and Guinevere are presumably equal participants in this

encounter, the narrative is told exclusively from his perspective. It is his
desire that is sated, his pleasure that is described, and his pains—culminat-
ing in the famous image of the disembodied heart—that rises to the
threshold of narratability. Her sexual experience, her pleasure, her emo-
tions, remain unnarrated. The narrator never describes what Guinevere
felt either during the sexual act itself or during their departure scene, even
as the narrator details Lancelot’s physical and emotional pleasure during
4676–4687. All citations from the French from Chrétien, Oeuvres Complètes.
121
Chrétien, Complete Romance, 227.

122
134 A.J. GOLDWYN
their union and his pain at their parting. Indeed, the next thirty-eight lines
of the poem (4706–4744) are devoted to Lancelot’s return home, his
physical suffering (he had cut his hand on the window bars of her room),
and his sadness that they have no plans to see one another again. By con-
trast, about that same period, the narrator devotes three lines: “La reïne la
matinee, | Dedanz sa chanbre ancortinee, | Se molt soëf andormie” (In the
morning, the queen had fallen into a gentle sleep in her curtained room).123
Whereas Lancelot’s physical and emotional state receives detailed atten-
tion, the queen immediately falls asleep, a move that allows the narrator to
avoid any mention of her physical or emotional state.
Later in the romance, Lancelot is captured by his enemy Meleagant,
whose capture of Guinevere had caused Lancelot to set out on the journey
that is the main subject of the romance. Placed in a tall tower, Lancelot
vanishes from sight, and all despair. Meleagant’s sister, however, goes in
search of him. Like Lancelot, she sets out to find someone captured by
Meleagant; like Lancelot, she has many adventures along the way—
Chrétien writes: “Mes je cuit qu’ainçois qu’el le truisse | En avra maint
païs cerchié, | Maint alé, et maint reverchié” (I believe that before she finds
him, she will have searched through many countries, traveled to many
places, and traversed many lands).124 But whereas Lancelot’s every move,
every adventure, every struggle is narrated in detail, about her journey he
writes: “Mes que valdroit se je contoie | Ne ses gistes ne ses jornees?” (But
why bother relating her journeys by day and her rests at night?).125 The
seeming innocuousness of this rhetorical question, however, both elides
women’s experiences generally and, perhaps more significantly, rules out
the possibility that women can be subjects of narrative at all. Though her
adventures parallel Lancelot’s in significant ways, his can be the subject of
romance even as hers can be easily dismissed in two lines.
Unlike the medieval Greek tradition, however, which offers no exam-
ples of romances written by and about women, the Western medieval tra-
dition offers at least one woman’s perspective on the genre of the medieval
romance. In what has come to be known as the “Quarrel of the Rose,” the
series of letters sent by the French critic and writer Christine de Pizan to
various correspondents at the turn of the fifteenth century and named
after the Roman de la Rose, the Old French romance that tells of a young
123
4745–4747; Chrétien, Complete Works, 228.
124
125
man’s dream journey through a garden to pluck a rose that represents a

flower, a woman, and female sexuality, Christine extends a critique of the
work in particular and of the genre as a whole. In her Letter to the God of
Love (L’epistre au dieu d’amours, 1399), Christine notes the difference in
narrative perspective between men and women, and responds to the ways
in which medieval romance enforces essentializing—and often misogynis-
tic—depictions of women:
Je leur respons que les livres ne rent

Pas les femmes, ne les choses n’i mirent
Que l’en y list contre elles et leurs meurs.
Si devisent a l’aise de leurs cuers
[…]
Mais se femmes eussent li livre fait,
Je sçay de vray qu’aultrement fust du fait,
Car bien scevent qu’a tort sont encoulpees.
To this I say that books were not composed

By women, nor did they record the things
That we may read against them and their ways.
Yet men write on, quite to their hearts’ content.
[…]
If women, though, had written all those books,
I know the works would read quite differently,
For well do women know this blame is wrong.126
Christine’s critique of the Roman de la Rose and other similar works fore-
grounds the silencing of women’s voices—in practice through cultural and
educational policies that limited women’s opportunities to write them-
selves, and in literary terms through adherence to conventions and ideolo-
gies that omit descriptions of their own perspectives.
In a letter to her interlocutor Pierre Col three years later, Christine
elaborates on the ways in which this male perspective furthers male sexual
desires at the expense of women, and she does so in the language of vio-
lence and combat:
Maistre Jehan de Meun enseingne comment le chastel de Jalousie sera

assailli et pris: il ne le fait point ad n que les deffendeurs estouppent le per-
126
409–419. All quotations from McWebb, Debating the Romance of the Rose.
136 A.J. GOLDWYN
tuis car il ne parle point a eulx ne il n’est de leur conseil; ains conforte et
ennorte les assaillans en toutes manieres d’assault.127
Master Jean de Meun teaches how Jealousy’s castle will be besieged and
taken. Yet his purpose is not to help the defenders protect the holes because
he in no way addresses them, and his advice is not for them. Instead, he
counsels the assailants in the many ways of assault.128
In appropriating the language of conquest, Christine foregrounds the

fraught issues of sexual assault, consent, and violence in romance court-
ship that chivalric rhetoric effaces. She is clear, moreover, about the power
dynamic inherent in these interactions: men are not just courting women,
they are attacking them and, in the end, subduing them. The medieval
romance, she argues, is a fundamentally misogynist genre in that it fur-
thers male fantasies of female subjugation rather than supporting female
agency and sexual choice.
Later, she argues that reading these works is not just an ideological or
aesthetic issue, but rather that the kinds of behavior that the heroes model
and the narrators sanction have real-world consequences, with particular
regard to the ways in which they validate and justify male violence towards
women in society:
J’ay ouy dire, n’a pas moult, a un de ces compaingnons de l’of ce dont tu es
et que tu bien congnois, et homme d’auctorité, que il congnoist un omme
marié, lequel ajou//ste foy au Rommant de la Rose comme a l’Euvangile;
cellui est souverainnement jalous, et quant sa passion le tient plus aigrement
il va querre son livre et lit devant sa feme, et puis ert et frappe sus et dist:
«Orde, tele comme quelle il dit, voir que tu me fais tel tour. Ce bon sage
homme maistre Jehan de Meun savoit bien que femmes savoient faire»! Et a
chacun mot qu’il treuve a son propos il ert un coup ou deux du pié ou de la
paume. Si m’est avis que quiconques s’en loue, celle povre femme le com-
pere chier.129
I have heard tell that one of the colleagues of your office, whom you know
well and who is a man of authority, knows a married man who believes in the
Roman de la rose as in the New Testament. He is terribly jealous, and when
his passions make him writhe he seeks his book and reads it in front of his
127
648–652.
128
675–679.
129
723–733.
wife, then he hits it and says, “Vile woman, you are like the woman in the
book and you betray me. This good and wise man, Master Jean de Meun,
knew well what women were capable of!” And with every word which he
found to his liking he kicked or slapped her once or twice. I think that who-
ever is proud of this, his poor wife must pay dearly.130
Perhaps as a counter to the silencing of women’s voices and experiences

and as a rebuke to those who would use romances to justify or valorize
misogynistic behavior, Christine’s The Tale of the Shepherdess evokes the
female perspective of the kinds of encounters women frequently faced in
romances East and West. The shepherdess, immune to love like the male
narrators of other romances, rejects the advances of many men, but she
too, like them, will learn the painful lessons of love. One day, while the
shepherdess is guarding her flocks, her song attracts a group of knights
who had been wandering through the forest:
Du chant queroient ou bois,

Mais ne m’ont pas tost trouvée,
Car le boys fueillu leur vée;
Mais moy, qui fus seule en crainte,
Des chevaulx ouy la frainte
Qui par le bois se hastoient
Et ja près de moy estoient,
Tout ne me veissent ilz mie.
Adonc la char me fremie
De paour, si me tins coye
Et du tout mon chant acoye.131
They were looking around the woods but could not right away find me
because the leaves barred their view. But I, alone and fearful, heard the noise
of the horses which were rushing through the forest and were already near
me, although they didn’t see me yet. Then I trembled with fear, held myself
completely still, and stopped singing.132
Told from the first-person perspective of the woman, the narrative gives
voice to an alternative view of this kind of familiar encounter and thus
takes on terrifying new implications: Christine articulates the fear of a soli-
130
754–763.
131
Pisan, Oeuvres Complètes, 485–497.
132
Pizan, Selected Writings, 48.
138 A.J. GOLDWYN
tary woman alone in the forest in the face of a large group of heavily armed
soldiers on horseback fitted for the hunt. When they finally see her and
come toward her, the shepherdess says “Or me tins je pour surprise, | Bien
cuiday morte estre ou prise”133 (I was very surprised and already thought
I was dead or about to be kidnapped).134 The shepherdess’s first thought
is that she might be subjected to violence or death. The leader of the
group of knights, perhaps seeing her fear, tells her “Pastoure, paour n’ayez
n’yre, | Car vous n’arez se bien non | Par nous […]”135 (Shepherdess, do
not be afraid or angry, for from us you will receive only good things).136
Fear and terror are the overriding emotions of the encounter, as narrated
by the shepherdess and recognized by the knights themselves, though the
knight’s soothing words turn out to be deceitful, as, indeed, she does suf-
fer much harm at their hands. More immediately, however, and as in the
other romances, men’s attempts to console and put women at ease are
betrayed by the power dynamic inherent in the encounter, as when the
knights demand the shepherdess resume the song she had stopped singing
so as not to be found by them in the first place:
«Si ne nous pouez fouïr:

Chanter il vous convendra
Dont ja mal ne vous vendra.»
[…]
Adonc des foys plus de six
Me pria que je chantasse
Hault et cler, riens ne doubtasse,
Mais longuement m’excusay
De chanter, car je n’osay.137
“You cannot get away: you have to sing; nothing bad will come of it.” […]
More than six times he asked me to sing loudly and clearly. I should fear
nothing, he said. But I made excuses for a long time, for I did not dare.138
Though he speaks the language of courtly love, praising the shepherdess

for her physical beauty and the beauty of her voice, for the shepherdess,
133
134
135
136
137
Pisan, Oeuvres Complètes, 582–584; 602–606.
138
the fear of violence—kidnapping or death, in her own words—lurks

behind his flowery rhetoric. Thus The Shepherdess’s Tale offers a female
perspective that subverts the generic conventions of such encounters,
which are traditionally focalized through men and thus prioritize male
experiences. When given voice, both in historical terms (Christine as a real
woman debating real men) and in the terms of the romance storyworld
(the Shepherdess as a narrative prioritizing women’s experiences and the
shepherdess as the narrative subject within the story), women’s perspec-
tives and experiences in the romance as a genre undergo radical transfor-
mation. What to the men seems like consent and pleasure appears, to the
women, as coercion and terror. It is only through the consistent denial of
women’s narrative capacity—and thus the capacity to see the truth of sex-
ual and emotional experiences that might not be in line with what male
authors, audiences, and narrators conceive of—that dominant masculini-
ties can be propagated.
Here again the parallel missions of animal studies, ecocriticism, postco-
lonialism, and women’s and gender studies converge. Kari Weil has noted
the ways in which the success of the latter two disciplines has had the
result that
previously marginalized or silenced groups were no longer to be confined to

the status of object but would be subjects of representations; their voices
were loud and demanded to be heard. How can that situation be compara-
ble to animal studies? True, for centuries nonhuman animals have been
locked in representations authored by humans, representations that, more-
over, have justified their use and abuse by humans. But unlike in women’s
studies or ethnic studies, those who constitute the objects of animal studies
cannot speak for themselves, or at least they cannot speak the languages that
the academy recognizes as necessary for such self-representation. Must they
then be forever condemned to the status of objects?139
In tying the ethical case for animal subjectivity to that of other marginal-
ized groups, Weil also, however, points to the limits of such a position:
subjectivity, in narrative storyworlds at any rate, is a logocentric construct.
Anastassiya Andrianova points to one solution in proposing reconsidera-
tions of traditions of scholarship and literary criticism that, as she argues in
the particular case of two Russian novellas but which has equally impor-
tant implications for literary criticism writ large, “through philological,
Weil, Thinking Animals, 2.

139
140 A.J. GOLDWYN
historical, political, and narratological lenses, have seen the animal experi-
ence as representative of human concerns. With a few exceptions, critical
readings tend to be human-centric even as the texts themselves center on
the animal in pain.”140 In so doing, she follows what Josephine Donovan
terms “animal-standpoint criticism,” a manifestation of a growing group
of “political criticisms [that] are rooted in what has come to be called
stand-point theory, which attempts to identify and articulate the point of
view or standpoint of a silenced, oppressed group.”141 The suffering of
animals during the hunting scenes, for instance, remains an unnarrated
experience.
Anthomorphic and zoomorphic metaphors, then, have more than sim-
ply literary resonance. As ecocriticism is not solely concerned with the
comparison of humans and the natural environment or the literary history
of particular kinds of metaphors, but is additionally concerned with the
environmental ideologies that such comparisons can reveal, this discussion
of anthomorphic and dendromorphic metaphors reveals, from a different
perspective, the same play of patriarchal forces that constrain men and
women differently. From the standpoint of the male writers and narrators
and the characters through whose subjectivity the narratives are focalized,
men must garden and plant, and women and animals must be the passive
agents on whose bodies masculinity and power are constructed through
violence. It also reveals larger ideas about civilization: who is civilized,
who is not, and how one can tell the difference. That the Parthians and
other non-Greek, non-Christian peoples frequently destroy gardens and
cities and regularly rape (or attempt to rape) the Greek heroines of the
novels positions them as the opposites of the Orthodox Greek heroes,
whose similar sexual violence towards and objectification of women is
obscured by its occurrence in lavish gardens or in floral metaphors.
140
Andrianova, “Narrating Animal Trauma,” 1.
141
Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 203. Donovan quotes Cary Wolfe’s assertion that “we are
forced to make the same kind of shift in the ethics of reading and interpretation that attended
taking sexual difference seriously in the 1990s (in the form of queer theory) or race and
gender seriously in the 1970s and 1980s” (Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human,” 567–568;
quoted in Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 203). The origins of this method of analysis can be
found in Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which argues that marginal voices—in
her case with specific reference to postcolonial literature of the Indian subcontinent—are
necessarily silenced in the dominant discourses of the colonizer: the postcolonial subject can-
not speak, she argues, except through the mediating voice of their own oppressors.
In this regard, as the insights of critical animal studies help in thinking

about the zoomorphic, avian, and hunting metaphors elsewhere in the
tradition, insights from the emergent field of critical plant studies demon-
strate Byzantine attitudes towards plants and, as importantly, the distance
between medieval and modern botanical knowledge. In Plants and
Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies, Randy Laist terms this increased
remove from plant-based knowledge “the defoliation of the cultural
imagination,”142 though he argues that contemporary poetry might be a
different case insofar as it “has a deep symbolic interrelationship with flow-
ering plants.”143 Michael Marder makes a similar point in Plant-Thinking:
A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, arguing that “non-human, non-animal living
beings, such as plants, have populated the margin of the margin, the zone
of absolute obscurity undetectable on the radars of our conceptualities.”144
Plant studies, however, differs from animal studies, he argues, in that while
contemporary ontological thinking has allowed for a blurring of the taxo-
nomic boundaries between the human and non-human animal,145 it still
struggles to acknowledge the affinities between animal and plant. This
analysis of plant metaphors in the medieval Greek romances, therefore,
challenges prevailing environmental ideology by forcing a reconsideration
of the ontological proximity of plants to humans. Metaphor and simile
describe the shared relationship of unlike things: the human can be com-
pared to the plant only because the human is not the plant. Yet the com-
parability of the two subjects suggests their innate affinity. Humans are
like plants in their physicality: like plants, humans twine around one
another for mutual security and survival and have similar somatic features
for accomplishing this (thus the frequent comparison of fingers, hands,
and arms to vines and branches). These metaphors, then, in showing great
care for the treatment of lovers, also inadvertently show great care for the
treatment of plants, the valuing of the life of the plant. Neither a woman
nor a grape, neither a beloved nor a rose, should be harmed. As human life
deserves protection, so too does plant life, as suggested in the indictment
142
Laist, Plants and Literature, 10.
143
Laist, Plants and Literature, 11.
144
Marder, Plant Thinking, 3.
145
For a perspective from medieval studies, see Steel, How to Make a Human: “Critical
animal theory stresses that the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal,’ as well as the assumption of
any absolute limit between humans and animals, must be radically rethought; it argues, fur-
thermore, that the category of ‘human’ is best understood by examining its dependent rela-
tion on the category ‘animal’” (4).
142 A.J. GOLDWYN
of Parthian and barbarian invaders killing lovers and plants, the two essen-
tial components for the regeneration of life.
The botanical metaphors thus make plants as much like humans as they
make humans like plants: ivy is given the human characteristic of desiring
oak, and the human action of embracing it. Indeed, humans are part of
nature, and this image, which has its roots at least as far back as the ancient
novel, demonstrates the ways in which the barbarians, as a threat to
humans, are also a threat to nature. Plants are imbued with sexualized
desire, with fears and aspirations, with natural life cycles of birth and death.
When Drosilla and Charikles are described as “like ivy clinging to an oak,
they kissed each other gladly,”146 it is as much the plants kissing gladly as
it is the lovers.
From the perspective of ecocriticism, a values-critiquing and values-
shaping discourse, these plant metaphors have more than decorative or
symbolic significance. Interpreting their use in the medieval Greek
romances in this way can further the discourse’s central aim of erasing the
hard ideological divisions that privilege the human over the non-human
animal, and both over non-human non-animal life, that is, plants. The
writers’ and audiences’ investment in the lives of the heroes and heroines
of the romances is based on the shared philosophical understanding of the
inherent uniqueness of individual experience: the stakes of Hysmine and
Hysminias are not the survival of humanity as such, but the survival and
successful reunion of two unique individuals, Hysmine and Hysminias,
whose lived experience differs from that of other people. Animal studies
has made significant strides in bringing animal life to this same level:
humans increasingly acknowledge the individuality of animals, the unique-
ness of their lived experience, and their inherent worth separated from any
instrumental value to humans.147 Indeed, animal rights activists have
increasingly rejected speaking of conservation in terms of broad popula-
146
D&C 7.229.
147
Thus, the ecofeminist Marti Kheel finds earlier generations of environmentalists “want-
ing primarily because of their inability to value animals as distinct individuals in their own
right. Each has marked preferences for thinking of ‘nature’ in terms of large abstractions—a
species, ecosystems, even the cosmos—rather than rooting their concern in real empathy for
living and often suffering fellow ‘other-than-human animals’ […] There is also a strong ten-
dency to value ‘nature’ in the abstract primarily for its beneficial effect on the human psyche,
rather than really being concerned with the quality of life of particular ‘nonhumans’ in their
own right” (Kheel, Nature Ethics, x).
tions of animal species, but rather speak in terms of protecting this or that
particular animal, whose life is intrinsically valuable.
With extremely rare exceptions made for exceptional plants (such as
Gargi, Methuselah, and Prometheus, three trees in California’s White
Mountains that, at around 5000 years, are the world’s oldest, or the chest-
nut tree that grew outside Anne Frank’s window), there is no such acknowl-
edgment of the value of the ordinary individual plant. But perhaps a reading
of plant metaphors that breaks down the ontological and t axonomical dif-
ference between plants and humans can change environmental ideology in
fundamental ways. If animal studies seeks to change cultural perceptions
of animals by demonstrating the humanity of the animal and the animality
of the human, so too can a more plant-centric perspective help change
cultural perceptions about the humanity of the plant and the plant-ness of
the human. Karl Steel, for instance, takes issue with (what he perceives as)
Martin Heidegger’s notion that “humans are not extraordinary animals,
for humans and animals are utterly incomparable.”148 animal studies has
largely succeeded in upending such a view, though there has been no simi-
lar re-evaluation of the human–plant relationship. Steel notes that he is not
advocating “for an abandonment of some kind of structuring fantasy of
self—such an abandonment, I agree, would be impossible—but for a less
violent […] way of being in a world of other beings.”149 Perhaps a similar
claim could be made for the treatment of the plants that constitute the
overwhelming majority of living beings on the planet. Acknowledging the
symbiotic relationship of animals and plants and their shared condition of
individual and collective being without ontological or taxonomic differ-
ence might render obsolete the ideology by which humans position them-
selves as the arbiters of plant life and death on individual and global scales
and alter the narrative practices that prioritize the male experience, and
instead allow for the investigation of critical standpoints more attuned to
the marginalized groups (other men, women, animals) through whose suf-
fering and death men come to understand themselves.
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(Forthcoming).
CHAPTER 4
Witches and Nature Control

in the Palaiologan Romances and Beyond
Witches in the Palaiologan Romances: Kallimachos

and Chrysorroi and Livistros and Rodamni
Among the characters who populate the later Byzantine romances, per-
haps no group is more marginalized or suffers more than the few witches
who appear in their pages.1 As with women elsewhere in the tradition,
these women, too, are objects to be used by men. Being old, ugly, and/or
foreign, however, these witches have no sexual value to the men and,
therefore, rather than ending up in marriage, they become the victims of
state-sanctioned exile and, ultimately, execution. Indeed, it is significant in
this regard that there are no male magic users in the romances, perhaps
because men are not close enough to nature to be able to manipulate its
power.2 All the witches, moreover, are non-Greeks, and at least one of the
1
For an earlier examination of witches, witchcraft, and female sexuality in the works of the
twelfth-century Cypriot monk Neophytos the Recluse, see Galatariotou, “Holy Women and
Witches.” Though the overarching contours of patriarchal control over women’s power and
their sexual agency (particularly with regards to the association of witchcraft/black magic
with sexual promiscuity and holiness with virginity) have many similarities, the differences
between theological writing such as Neophytos’ and the more secular romance tradition also
suggest the limits of such a comparison.
2
In Livistros and Rodamni, the magician seems at first to be a male merchant (L&R s1393;
Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 147), though it is revealed later that he was actually
just following the orders of the witch (L&R e2848; Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances,
154). The type of astrologer/magician described in the romances goes unmentioned in the
major work on the subject, Magdalino and Mavroudi, Occult Sciences, which

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6_4
148 A.J. GOLDWYN
witches is racially marked; indeed, the witches may be the only black char-
acters in all of the romances.3 Klitovon in Livistros and Rodamni describes
her as “γραῖα ταλαίπωρος, μαύρη ὡς Σαρακήνα, | γυμνὴ καὶ ὁλοασκέπαστος”
(A miserable old woman, black as a Saracen, naked, completely without
clothes).4 The other witch, in Kallimachos and Chrysorroi, is described at
first only as “Γυνὴ γάρ τις πολύπειρος καὶ δαιμονώδης φύσις, |
στοιχειοκρατοῦσα μαγικῶς, ἀστρολογοσκοποῦσα” (a certain sly old
woman, a demonic creature who controlled spirits by magic and was
versed in astrology).5 Though she shares with her counterpart in Livistros
both advanced age and poverty, her race is not mentioned. It may, how-
ever, be alluded to at the end of the romance, when the king curses her
saying: “μυσαρά, σκεῦος μελανομένων, | ἠσβολωμένη καὶ κακὴ καὶ τῶν
δαιμόνων μήτηρ” (You foul, black baggage, you accursed mother of
focuses mostly on more learned practitioners of the occult. See also Greenfield, “A
Contribution,” 125.
3
By contrast, see Digenis Akritis, where Digenis’ father the Emir, though an Arab, is
depicted as white, thus marking his suitability (1.32). For the intersection of race, religion,
and marriage in Byzantine and Western medieval romances, see also Goldwyn, “Interfaith
Marriage.”
4
L&R s1612; Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 152. Betts, Three Medieval Greek
Romances, is a translation drawn from the four manuscripts published in Lambert, Le roman
de Libistros; thus, I have followed him in putting the letter before the line number to refer to
the manuscript in citations. Though the myriad textual problems with the manuscripts of the
romances are beyond the scope of the current investigation, a few words on my choice of
editions might also be included. A new edition of Kallimachos has been published in Romanzi
cavallereschi bizantini: Callimaco e Crisorroe, Beltandro e Crisanza, Storia di Achille, Florio e
Plaziaflore, Storia di Apollonio di Tiro, Favola consolatoria sulla Cattiva e la Buona Sorte, a
cura di Carolina Cupane. Classici Greci: Autori della tarda antichità e dell’ età bizantina
(Torino: Classici UTET, 1995). Two scholarly editions of Livistros have also been published:
Ἀφήγησις Λιβίστρου καὶ Ροδάμνης. Κριτική ἔκδοση τῆς διασκευῆς α´, μὲ εἰσαγωγή, παραρτήματα
καὶ εὑρετήριο λέξεων, ed. P.A. Agapitos, Βυζαντινή και Νεοελληνική Βιβλιοθήκη 9 (Athens:
Cultural Foundation of the National Bank [MIET], 2006) and Livistros and Rodamni. The
Vatican Version. Critical Edition with Introduction, Commentary and Index-Glossary, ed.
T. Lendari, Athens: Βυζαντινή και Νεοελληνική Βιβλιοθήκη10, 2007. Though Beaton argues
that “these will not fully supersede” the Lambert edition (Beaton, From Byzantium to
Modern Greece, Chap. 13, n.3), a more detailed treatment of the variant manuscript tradition
comparing MS V with MS S (part of the ‘A’ tradition published by Agapitos) might allow for
an interesting analysis of the variation in these scenes in different versions of the same poem.
Because, however, Lambert’s and Pichard’s editions offer good readings of the passages in
question, and to make for easier comparison with the English translation in Betts (who also
used Lambert and Pichard), I have opted to use these editions here. For Velthandros and
Chrysandza, I follow Betts in using Kriaras, Βυζαντινὰ ἱπποτικὰ μυθιστορήματα, 1955.
5
K&C 1066; Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 58.
WITCHES AND NATURE CONTROL IN THE PALAIOLOGAN ROMANCES… 149
devils).6 This accusation of blackness may be a reference to her evil charac-

ter rather than her race, though it is still a marked usage.7 On account of
gender, race, religion, and age, the women are thus marginal figures; it is
not surprising, then, given an ecofeminist reading of the intersection of
these othering characteristics, that these women have occult powers and
access to demonic spirits.
The description of the witch in Livistros is far more detailed than that in
Kallimachos. In the former, she offers a summary of her life story:
Ἐγω, παιδιἀ μου, γέγονα τῆς χώρας τῆς Αἰγύπτου,

οὐκ ἀπὸ γένους εὐγενοῦς, οὐδὲ ἐκ τῆς κάτω τύχης.
ἔμαθα τὸ ὕψος νὰ κρατῶ, τὰ ἄστρα νὰ τὰ βλέπω,
καὶ νὰ προλέγω μαντικῶς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου τὰς πασχήσεις.
καὶ κατ’ ὀλίγον ὀλιγὸν ἐπείρασέ με ὁ χρόνος
καὶ δοκιμὸν μὲ ἀπέδειξειν εἰς τῆς μαγίας τὴν τέχνην
νὰ συντυχαίνω δαίμονας εἰς νύκτας ἀσελήνους,
τριόδια νὰ τρέχω μόνη μου νὰ δαιμονογυρεύω.
καὶ εἶχα τοιούτην δύναμιν ὅτι ὅταν ἠβουλήθην
ἤφερνα εἰς γῆν τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ ἤλμεγα τοὺς ἀστέρας.8
My children, I was born in the land of Egypt, neither of a noble family nor
of the lowest class. I learnt to control the heavens, to observe the stars and
to foretell the misfortunes of humans by prophecy. Little by little, Time
made trial of me and showed me proficient in the art of magic. I used to talk
with demons on moonless nights, I used to frequent crossroads by myself to
summon them. I had such power that, when I wished, I brought the heav-
ens down to earth and milked the stars.9
The principle form of magic practiced by this witch is that over nature: she
can observe the skies and control the movement of stars and the demons
who inhabit them. It is equally significant that both of these witches violate
the laws of nature to help powerful male characters achieve their goals,
6
7
By contrast, the Emir in Digenis Akritis is described in the poem’s opening lines as: “οὐ
μέλας ὡς Αἰθίοπε, ἀλλὰ ξανθός” (“not black like the Ethiopians, but fair and handsome”
[DA.1.32]). The Emir turns out to be a good man, therefore he cannot have dark skin; the
witches, however, turn out to be—at least according to the narrative logic of these texts—
evil, and therefore must also be dark.
8
L&R s1633.
9
Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 152.
150 A.J. GOLDWYN
only to be thrown aside later at the arbitrary bidding of the same men. The
witch in Livistros tells the heroes how, after having used her magic to
empower Verderichos, the king of Egypt, to steal Rodamni, he abandoned
her:
Πλὴν ὅταν ἀπεσώσαμεν εἰς τὸν αἰγιαλὸν ἐτοῦτον,

ἐπαίρει τὸ καμῆλιν μου, πεξεύει με ἀπ’ ἐκεῖνο
καὶ μὲ τὴν κόρην μόνος του περνᾷ εἰς γῆν Αἴγυπτου,
νὰ μὴν μνηθῇ δουλείαν μου, μηδὲ συνέργησίν μου!
καὶ χρόνον ἔχω ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν, παιδία μου, καὶ χρόνους ἕξ,
νὰ μυριοτζιγαρίζωμαι, νὰ κάθωμαι εἰς τὰ βράχη.10
But when we reached this coast he took my camel, made me dismount and
continued on alone with the lady to Egypt. He forgot what I had done and
how I had helped him. For a year and six months now, my children, I have
been sitting on these rocks, suffering countless torments.11
The witch’s story thus exemplifies the treatment of women who have no
instrumental value to men. The king treats her well and makes great prom-
ises to her as long as he needs her, but when she is no longer useful, he
discards her with no remorse. And, strangely for a woman who has the
power to move the stars, summon demons, and control life and death, she
is unable to use those powers to help herself in her moment of need; she
is reduced to living in the wilds in a state of near starvation. She cannot, it
seems, use her powers to benefit herself. Indeed, when Livistros reveals
himself, the witch
ἀποτάττεται καὶ ἤρξατο ἀπὸ τότε

νὰ πίπτῃ εἰς τὰ ποδάρια μας, νὰ κλαίῃ καὶ νὰ μᾶς λέγῃ·
“Μή, μὴ ἀποθάνω ἡ δυστυχής, νὰ ποιήσω τὸ ποθεῖτε.”12
was thrown into confusion and then began to grovel at our feet. She said in
her tears, “Do not kill me, no, wretch that I am. I shall do what you want.”13
The witch, who has just described her meetings with demons and her easy
access to occult powers, and who will soon give the heroes magic horses
10
L&R s1732.
11
12
L&R s1760.
13
who can cross water, is, however, unable to defend herself against two men
in her home. Indeed, some few lines later, she consults the stars for the
benefit of the aristocratic couple who are threatening her life, but she does
not consult the stars to protect herself.14 An ecofeminist reading of this
passage suggests that female power over nature is only effective when used
to further male ends; it is ineffective when used in self-defense against
those same men. The witch has no problem using her magic to help the
king of Egypt steal Rodamni, nor when she uses it to help Livistros get
Rodamni back, but she is powerless to protect herself.
This inability to use magic for her own benefit is evident in an even
more striking scene towards the end of the romance. After their reunion,
Livistros and Rodamni return to the witch’s hut as they retrace their jour-
ney on the way home, and Rodamni, recalling her past suffering at the
hands of the witch, says to Livistros:
“Ὁρκίζω σε εἰς τὰς συμφορὰς τὰς ἔπαθες δι’ ἐμένα,

ὀμνύω σε εἰς τὴν ἀγάπην μου καὶ εἰς τὴν ἀσχόλησίν μου,
σκότωσε τὴν κακομίαρον· ἡ μαγικήν της τέχνη
ἐμὲν ἐσὲν ἐξένωσεν καὶ σὲ νεκρὸν έποῖκεν.”
Καὶ τὸ σπαθὶν ὁ Λίβιστρος ἔσυρεν κατ’ ἐκείνην
καὶ τὸ κεφάλιν ἔκοψεν τῆς κακομάγου γραίας.
“Λυτρώσω,’ λέγει, ‘σήμερον μέγαν κακὸν ὁ κόσμος
καὶ θανατώσω δαίμοναν ψυχοσωματωμένον!”
Ἐφώναξεν ὁ Λίβιστρος, ἐσκότωσεν τὴν γραῖαν.15
“I conjure you by the misfortunes you have suffered for me, I conjure you
by my love and my passion—kill this foul and evil woman. Her magic art
exiled me from you and rendered you lifeless.” Livistros drew his sword and
cut off the evil witch’s head. “Today,” he said, “I free the world of a great
evil and I kill a demon in human form.” With this cry Livistros killed the old
woman.16
The lovers’ rage at the witch seems harsh and unjustified. It was not, after
all, the witch’s idea to steal her away; rather, she was summoned by the
king and did what was required of her. Her help in reuniting Livistros and
Rodamni apparently does not mitigate her initial crime against them
14
L&R s1765; Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 155.
15
L&R s2761.
16
152 A.J. GOLDWYN
either, since Livistros still cuts off her head despite her giving them crucial
information and resources. Adding to the injustice, of course, is the fact
that they make no effort to punish the king of Egypt; only marginalized
and defenseless old women are subject to summary execution, it seems.
The wrongs of the rich, powerful, and male go unavenged. And, in her
moment of need, the witch is unable to use her magic to save her own life;
she is killed by Livistros, who had only recently benefited from the use of
that same magic.
A similar though even worse and more unjust fate befalls the witch in
Kallimachos. In that romance, there is also a king in love with the hero’s
beloved. This king is so distraught with lovesickness that he will do any-
thing to capture Chrysorroi. Upon finding out that the witch is at his door
with a cure, the king says: “καὶ πὄναι; φέρε την. Τί στέκεις; τί πομένεις; |
Τί καρτερεῖς; Εἰπέ με το. Δράμε, συντόμως φθάσε” (Where is she? Fetch
her! Why stand there? Why wait? Why delay? Answer me! Move! Be
quick!).17 When the witch says she can help him, moreover, the king
becomes even more invested:
Γραῦς μου, καὶ ποίσῃς τίποτε καὶ τὸ ποθῶ κερδήσω,

μάνναν νὰ λέγουσιν ἐσέ, ἐμέναν δὲ παιδίν σου.
ὁλόχρυσον τὴν στήλην σου στήσουν εἰς τὸ παλάτιν,
μεγάλας ἕυρῃς χάριτας, πρᾶγμαν πολὺν κερδήσεις.18
My good woman, do something to make me gain what I desire, and you will
be called my mother and I your son. A golden statue of you will be set up in
the palace. You will receive great favors and gain enormous wealth.19
The king, then, in full knowledge of the witch’s plan, in full knowledge
that he is setting off to steal another man’s beloved, has no qualms at this
point in the story about the morality of his actions. Indeed, he is eager to
move ahead with her plan of making an apple that will put Kallimachos
into a deathlike sleep, thus allowing him to take Chrysorroi from him; he
promises her great rewards for doing so. It is inexplicably strange and
cruel, then, that at the end of the story, when Kallimachos and Chrysorroi
are reunited and brought before the king and explain their situation to
him, he says:
17
18
Κ&C 1170.
19
τίνος, εἰπέ, τῆς ἀφορμῆς καὶ τίνος ἐξ αἰτίας

διπλοῦν τὸ μῆλον ἔποικες, ζῆν τε καὶ θανατώνειν;
Μή τις ποσῶς ἠνέγκασεν, κατεδυνάστευσέν σε,
μὴ θέλουσαν παρέσυρεν, κἀκ τῆς αἰτίας ταύτης
ἐποῖκες ὅσον ἔποικες, δαῖμον σατανωμένη;
Τίνα δὲ σήμερον ἐγὼ σωματωμένον ἄλλον
δαίμονα κακομήχανον, ψυχόλεθρον στοιχεῖον
λυτρώσω πρὸς ὑπόμνησιν τοῦ γένους τῶν ἀνθρώπων;20
Tell me the reason why you gave the apple its double power of death and
life? Did someone compel you? Did someone apply force and make you act
against your will? Was it because of this that you did what you did, you devil
incarnate? You are the evil devil in human form, the baneful spirit that today
I am going to wipe from the memory of the race.21
It is odd that the king would ask such questions, since both he and the
witch, as well as the readers, know that, though no one compelled her and
no one applied force, it was the king himself who set the events in motion
and made her great promises. The only explanation for the king’s anger
besides a hypocritical change of heart would be that his anger is not at the
witch for participating in the scheme, but for giving the apple “its double
power”; that is to say, he is not upset that she gave the apple the power to
kill Kallimachos, but that she gave it the power to revive him as well. This,
however, seems unlikely, since the king appears to be repenting of the
entirety of his action and is merely using the witch as a scapegoat.
Following his accusations and threat against the witch, he says,
«Καμίνου φλόγαν δυνατὴν ἀνάψαντες, μεγάλην,

ταύτης τὸ σῶμα καύσατε, κἄν τὴν ψυχὴν οὐδ’ ὅλως.
δαίμων γὰρ οὖσα τῆς φλογὸς συντόμως ἀποφύγῃ.»
Ὁ λόγος ἔργον γέγονεν, οὐδὲ στιγμὴ παρῆλθεν.22
“Light up a great blazing fire! Burn her body even if you cannot destroy her
soul! She is a devil and will quickly escape from the flames.” Before a
moment had passed the order was carried out.23
20
K&C 2580.
21
22
Κ&C 2588.
23
154 A.J. GOLDWYN
As in the example from Livistros, the witch in Kallimachos is able to use

her magic to help the king steal away the woman he loves and leave her
lover for dead, but when her own life is at stake, her magical powers are
useless. Her marginalized status is further emphasized in her summary
execution; unlike Kallimachos, who, when brought before the king, is
allowed to make a long speech that ultimately exonerates him, the witch is
not allowed any defense at all. Thus, though it seems that only old, poor,
dark-skinned women have access to magic and occult powers that allow
them to alter and defy natural laws, those powers can only be used effec-
tively when furthering the ends of young, upper-class, white men. Indeed,
the similar phrasing of the executions suggests an idiomatic or even generic
formula for such scenes; in Livitros, the executioner says: “‘Λυτρώσω,’
λέγει, ‘σήμερον μέγαν κακὸν ὁ κόσμος | καὶ θανατώσω δαίμοναν
ψυχοσωματωμένον!’” (“Today,” he said, “I free the world of a great evil
and I kill a demon in human form”).24
The executioner in Kallimachos uses a similar phrase:
Τίνα δὲ σήμερον ἐγὼ σωματωμένον ἄλλον

δαίμονα κακομήχανον, ψυχόλεθρον στοιχεῖον
λυτρώσω πρὸς ὑπόμνησιν τοῦ γένους τῶν ἀνθρώπων25;
You are the evil devil in human form, the baneful spirit that today I am
going to wipe from the memory of the race.26
Like the world that produced them, the world of the medieval romance
was a highly restrictive patriarchy, reserving agency for this particular seg-
ment of society. Women (and particularly unnamed women, including two
of the three witches considered here), non-Christians, the poor, and other
similarly marginalized figures are made to conform to the will of this privi-
leged class, and when they are no longer needed they are discarded.
Ecofeminism offers a theoretical framework for articulating these types of
power dynamics; it argues that those structures that arouse fear of women
and thus oppress them are the same as those that fear and oppress nature.
24
L&R s.2767; Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 175.
25
K&C 2585.
26
Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 87. Τhe irony of this diction is further enhanced
when, five lines later, Kallimachos is “τὰ σίδηρα λυτρώσας,” which Betts translates as “freed
[…] from his chains,” a very different meaning than when applied to the witch, who is freed
from life through immolation with the same verb.
An analysis of nature control and environmental modification in the

Byzantine romances bears out this hypothesis. Women and nature are fear-
some, wild, and unpredictable, but can, if brought under patriarchal con-
trol, be beneficial to the men who control them, and they are easily
discarded when no longer needed.
Medea and the Greek War of Troy in Its Pan-

European Context
At just over 14,400 lines, Ὁ Πὀλεμος τῆς Τρωάδος, the Greek War of Troy,
is by far the longest of all the medieval Greek romances, and the earliest of
those produced during the Palaiologan period.27 Dated recently to the
period between 1267 and 1281, the work itself is a translation of Benoît
de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie of the 1150s, one of many translations
of Benoît into the vernacular languages of medieval Europe.28 Translation
in the Middle Ages, as today, was not simply a philological issue of trans-
ferring words and phrases from one language to another. It was also,
sometimes by authorial design, sometimes not, a transferring of one cul-
ture and ideology onto another, and in such transference can be seen the
adaptation and domestication of the foreign ideologies contained in a lit-
erary work into the political, cultural, and literary contexts of the target
language. This process of cultural translation thus shapes the presentation
of the constellation of ideological concerns that lie at the heart of ecocriti-
cal analysis: the depiction of the ecological, gender, colonial, and other
patriarchal ideologies that inform these translations.
An ecocritical critique of these ideologies from the perspective of com-
parative literature and translation studies can thus foreground the differ-
ent ways such values are constructed across cultures. Because translations
of Benoît’s work are extant in so many languages, an ecocritical examination
is best served through the examination of a representative sample of such
texts: in addition to the Greek translation, then, this chapter will examine
Guido delle Colonne’s Latin Historia Destructionis Troiae of 1287, as well
as three versions of the tale that use Guido as their source: the anonymous
Spanish Cronica Troyana and the anonymous Middle German Trojanische
Jeffreys, “From Hercules to Erkoulios,” forthcoming.

27
The new date is proposed in Jeffreys, “From Hercules to Erkoulios,” forthcoming,

28
which also contains a discussion of the shift towards this earlier date from Jeffreys’ earlier
suggestion of 1350 or, more generally, “the fourteenth century.”
156 A.J. GOLDWYN
Krieg, both from the fourteenth century, and the Englishman John
Lydgate’s Troy Book of 1412–1420.
Due to the great length of these works, this chapter will examine one
specific episode, the doomed romance of Jason and Medea, the first and
thus most obviously programmatic of the many love stories in the work
and the one concerned most directly with varied ways of engaging with
the natural world. The plot of the narrative is familiar from the ancient
sources: Jason arrives in Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece; he and
Medea fall in love, and she, fearing for his life, shows him how to over-
come the dangerous obstacles that lie in his way in exchange for a promise
of marriage. Though Jason is the nominal hero of the story, Medea is, as
she has always been, by far the more interesting character. As Ruth Morse
has shown in The Medieval Medea, Medea in the Middle Ages, as in antiq-
uity, presented a uniquely discomfiting challenge to normative patriar-
chy.29 As a woman, a pagan, and a foreigner, Medea was a thrice-marked
other, and her differing treatment in the medieval tradition is therefore
illustrative of the authors’ differing attitudes towards these three aspects of
her character. As we will see, the medieval authors—all of them men—
wrestled with how to depict this confounding woman. The misogynistic
and xenophobic rhetoric they employ in their depictions were not uniquely
applied to Medea but were widespread attitudes towards women and eth-
nic, racial, and religious others. What makes Medea interesting is just how
many of these identity problems she simultaneously embodies: crystalliz-
ing a diffuse and interlocking set of marginalized positions all at once, the
problems of controlling violence and sexual objectification that defined
the treatment of the heroines of romances are even more pronounced in
the depiction of Medea.
Morse’s analysis of Medea covers the pressing concerns of revisionist
scholars at the time during which her book was written: reading The
Medieval Medea, one would—to paraphrase the lines from Glotfelty’s
introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader—quickly discern that race (as a
non-Greek), class (as royalty), and gender (as a woman) all play into
Morse’s treatment of Medea. Morse analyzes Medea from the feminist
perspective, writing, for example: “The Multiplication of ‘Medeas’ (which
assume a Medea) influenced depictions of ‘Woman’ which went well
beyond genre categories to create an essentialist definition by which
29
The Greek War of Troy is omitted from her analysis, an omission excusable in light of the
fact that the first proper edition of the work came out the same year as her book.
women were judged.”30 But this reading of Medea’s femininity elides her
powerful connection to the environment, and, indeed, it is her connection
to nature, represented by her magical powers of nature control, that is, in
many ways, her defining feature.
Indeed, Medea’s power over nature is the central facet of her character-
ization in the medieval romance tradition. In the Greek War of Troy, for
instance, she is introduced as follows:
Ἦτον ἡ κορη φρόνιμη, πολλὰ γραμματισμένη.

ἤξευρε τέχνας φοβερὰς τῆς λεκανομαντείας,
ἀστρονομίας ὑψηλῆς, πάσης μαγείας <εἰς> ἄκρον.
τόσα τὰς ἤξευρε πολλὰ, τόσα τᾶς ἐπαιδεύθη,
ἡμέραν νύκταν νὰ ἔποισεν ἂν ἤθελε καὶ μόνον …
Μηδεία ὠνομάζετον τὸ ὄνομα τῆς κόρης.31
The girl was intelligent, very well learned;

she knew the fearsome art of dish-divining,
advanced astronomy, the acme of all magic;
she knew such things well, in such things was she learned,
she could make day into night if only she wanted …
The name of this girl was Medea.32
Her introduction in the poem emphasizes her knowledge of the occult

and its relation to natural laws. More than simply an observer and inter-
preter of these natural phenomena as a typical dish-diviner or astronomer,
Medea actually has control over them: she can turn day into night at will.
This scene is considerably condensed from the Old French source, par-
ticularly in its description of Medea’s powers as a magician with control
over the natural environment:
Trop ert cele de grant saveir:

Mout sot d’engin e de maistrie,
De conjure et de sorcerie;
Es arz ot tant s’entente mise
Que trop par ert sage e aprise;
Astronomie e nigromancie
30
Morse, Medieval Medea, xv. Similar readings concerned with gender can be found
throughout.
31
WoT 273–278.
32
Translation my own.
158 A.J. GOLDWYN
Sot tote par cuer dès enfance;

D’arz saveit tant e de conjure,
De cler jor feïst nuit oscure;
S’ele vousist, ço fust viaire
Que volisseiz par mi cel aire;
Les eves faiseit corre ariere:
Scientose ert de grant maniere.33
She had this great knowledge:

She had much skill and mastery
In conjuring and sorcery;
She had paid such attention to these arts
That she became wise and learned;
Astronomy and necromancy
She had in her heart since infancy;
She knew so well that art of conjuring,
that she could turn clear day into dark night;
if she wanted, it would seem as if
you were flying through the air;
She could make the rivers run backwards:
Her knowledge was of such great kind.34
In the penultimate line of the Greek quoted above, the editors include an
ellipsis at the end of the line, and in a gloss on the line in the apparatus,
write: “lacunam post μόνον notavit Pap.”35 This suggestion of a lacuna
that might contain an elaboration of Medea’s powers as an environmental
modifier in the French source elides the differing interests the authors may
have had in addressing ecology and ecological forces. Such a reading also
opens up possibilities for ecofeminist readings of the texts, since it is only
a woman who has such control over nature, and an author’s interest in
such issues might differ from translator to translator.
An ecocritical reading of this passage reveals more starkly the environ-
mental and gendered ideologies that underlie the translations of this scene
when placed in a comparative context. In the thirteenth century, Benoît’s
work was translated into Latin by Guido delle Colonne (also referred to as
Guido del Columnis) in his Historia Destructionis Troiae. Guido, unlike
his Greek counterpart, does not uncritically accept Benoît’s depiction of
33
Roman de Troie, 1216–1229.
34
Translation my own.
35
Jeffreys and Papathomopoulou, Ho Polemos, 13.
Medea’s powers.36 Rather, he devotes significant time to describing the

types of environmental modification of which Medea is capable and then
refuting the truth of those statements on both scientific and theological
grounds:
Set eius margarite scientia ex qua potius prepollebat erat illa ars mathemat-
ica, que per uires et modos exorcizationum nigromanticos lucem uertebat in
tenebras, subito uentos inducebat et pluuias, corruscationes et grandines, et
timidos terremotus. Fluuiorum autem decursus per decliuia loca labentes ad
superiores partes influere et redundare cogebat. <H>yemali etiam impugna-
tione frondibus arbores spoliatas compellebat in ipsa turbinis tempestate
florescere, iuunes faciendo senescere et senes ad iuuentutis gloriam prouo-
cando. Hanc credere uoluit antiqua gentilitas luminaria magna, scilicet
solem et lunam, sepius coegisse contra naturalium ordinem eclipsari.37
But the knowledge of that jewel by reason of which she was the more distin-
guished was the art of magic, through powers and necromantic means and
incantations, turned light into dark, suddenly raised up winds and storms,
lightning and hail, and fearful earthquakes. She forced the course of rivers
gliding through lower places to pour into higher parts and overflow. She
also made trees, despoiled of their branches by the onslaught of winter,
bloom even in the season of storms, making the young grow old and recall-
ing the aged to the glory of youth. The pagans of antiquity were willing to
believe that she could very often force the great planets, that is, the sun and
the moon, to go into eclipse against the order of nature.38
It is significant from an ecocritical and ecofeminist perspective that all of

her powers relate explicitly to her control over the natural world and its
processes, thus establishing the close relationship between nature and the
feminine, the cultural/ethnic, and the religious other.
Though Guido remains true to his source’s essential depiction of
Medea’s magic powers, the rhetorical manner in which he describes them
is markedly different. Unlike in Benoît and the Greek War of Troy, where
the narrator is more or less neutral about Medea’s education and powers,
Guido is actively hostile to Medea from the outset. For him, Medea’s
decision to get an education seems to stand in opposition to his concep-
tion of what a woman should be doing at her age: he twice stresses her
36
See Morse, Medieval Medea, 188–191 for a reading of Guido’s Medea.
37
Guido, Historia (1936), 15.
38
160 A.J. GOLDWYN
arriageability, then suggests that her lack of a husband is the result of her
m
decision to learn the liberal arts and magic.
Unable to reconcile himself to a world in which women have such pow-
ers, Guido rejects the claim, and offers a theological refutation of his
source:
Sed ille fabularis Sulmonensis Ouidius sic de Medea, Oetis regis filia, de ipsa
fabulose commentans, tradidit esse credendum (quod absit a catholicis
Cristi fidelibus credi debere nisi quatenus ab Ouidio fabulose narratur).
Nam ille summus et eternus Deus, qui in sapientia, id est in Filio, cuncta
creauit, celestia corpora planetarum propria sub lege disposuit, et ea statuens
in eternum preceptum imposuit eus quod non preteribunt.39
But that storytelling Ovid of Sulmo, writing fictitiously about Medea,

daughter of Aeëtes, thus proposed it should be believed of her (which it is
not fitting that Catholics faithful to Christ should believe, except to the
extent that it was told as a story by Ovid). For the high and eternal God,
Who in His Wisdom, that is, in the Son, created all things, placed the heav-
enly bodies of the planets according to His own law, and placing them, He
imposed on them for all eternity an injunction that they will not
disregard.40
The one exception to this rule, however, is when Christ was crucified, an
event so powerful that only the Christian god could accomplish it:
Hic est uerus et eternus Deus, cuius est posse naturalia queque dissoluere et
cogere in lege nature peccare, qui sola unius sui fidelis prece cursum solis
mundanum contra naturalem institutionem ipsius ad Sabaoth figi et stari
mandauit. Hoc autem de Medea secundum fabulas ideo ponitur quoniam
sic de ea fabulose fuisse presens ystoria non obmittit, cum et ipsam fuisse in
astronomia et nigromantia peritissimam non negetur.41
This is the true and eternal God, Who has power to destroy every element
of nature and to force each of them to transgress against the law of nature,
Who by a single prayer of a faithful one ordered the earthly course of the sun
against its natural law to be fixed and stand still at Sabaoth. However, all this
about Medea is therefore set forth according to the legends, although the
39
40
41
present history does not omit the fact that this material about her was leg-
endary, since it is not to be denied that she was extremely skilled in astrology
and witchcraft.42
In his description of the Byzantine attitude towards magic, Richard

Greenfield writes: “For the doctrinalists, magic was nothing but a delusion
induced by evil spiritual powers; it was also necessarily false for, to assume
that an individual spirit or person possessed power to act in or by itself, as
magic did in its notion of automatic control, was to challenge or deny the
unique position of God as the ultimate and sole originator and controller
of everything that happened and was done in the world.”43 In this, Guido’s
attitude matches Byzantine attitudes towards magic (though not those
held by Benoît or his Greek translator).
Guido marks environmental control as a pagan belief that should be
disregarded. Moreover, it is only the male Christian God, not a female
pagan, who has such environmental control. The power that controls
nature, in this reading, thus also excludes the agency of women and
pagans. Guido, therefore, adds a moralizing element to his narrative,
expanding greatly not just on the description of Medea’s powers them-
selves, but more significantly on the theological components of his source:
unlike the previous authors, Guido is concerned with bringing his narra-
tive into line with contemporary Christian theology to a degree that his
predecessors are not. Indeed, even his successors are ambivalent about this
level of overt theologizing.
The German translation reads:
Die genante Media, des konige tochter, was wol irfaren in den siben freuen
kŭnsten, das man in den zceiten kaume iren gleichen fant, und sunderlich
waß sie wol das sie wol irfraren in den swarczen kunsten.
The mentioned Medea, the king’s daughter, was well skilled in the seven
liberal arts, so that at the time no one was found equal to her, and in particu-
lar she was skilled in the black arts.44
42
43
Greenfield, “A Contribution,” 118.
44
Zwei Ostmitteldeutsche Bearbeitungen Lateinischer Prosadenkmäler, 73. Translated by
Baukje Van Den Berg.
162 A.J. GOLDWYN
This translation not only diminishes the depiction of Medea’s magic pow-
ers; it also omits entirely the moralizing theological elements found in
their source. The German writer’s ideological discomfort with the level of
misogynistic vitriol directed at Medea is reflected in his choice not to
include those passages in his translation. The Spanish translation attempts
something of a middle ground, moralizing that she should have gotten
married, but refraining from the theological indictment of Medea’s prac-
tice of magic:
Medea, la qual y era en hedad que deujese al talamo ser rresçebida e en mat-
rimonjo rresçebir conpañja. Pero fasta en aquella sazon desde su pequeña
hedad sienpre se dio al estudio de las artes liberales; pero la çiençia a que ella
con mayor afjncançia se diese, aquella magica çiençia e njgiromançia, la qual,
por varios modos de conjuraçiones, fazia tornar la luz en tjnjeblas e fazia
venjr quando queria vientos e lluujas e rrelanpagos e tenpestades; e fazia los
mançebos enveieçer e los vieios ser tornados a la gloria de la jouentud, ca en
saber de estrologia e njgromançia Medea era la muy sabia.
Medea had already reached the age that should have seen her received in
thalamus and in nuptials receive a mate. But up to that moment from her
early age she had always been given to the study of the liberal arts; but the
science to which she had taken with greatest reverence, that of mathematical
art and necromancy, which, through various means of conjurations, she
would turn the light to darkness and she would make the winds come when-
ever she wanted and rain and lightning and storms, and she would make
youths age and the aged returned to the glory of their youth, since in the
knowledge of astrology and necromancy Medea was very wise.45
The translation that most dutifully follows the moralizing excursus in

the Historia Destructionis Troiae is John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century Troy
Book.46 Lydgate’s introduction of Medea follows Guido’s pattern: she is
“able for age maried to be,” but has rejected any attempts to be married,
since she prefers to study: “In all þe artis called liberal | Sche was expert &
knowyng at þe beste” (In all the liberal arts | she was an expert and had
knowledge of the best [aspects]).47 Lydgate then expounds significantly
on Medea’s powers over the environment, committing them to nearly
45
Norris, La Coronica Troyana, 57. Translated by Carlos Hawley.
46
For Lydgate’s treatment of Medea, see Morse, Medieval Medea, 195–198.
47
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 1601; I 1607–1608. All translations of Lydgate are my own.
eighty lines (1619–1695). Among her powers are those found in the pre-
vious sources, such as her expertise in astronomy and necromancy
(1623–1624), though Lydgate also expounds on her specific practice of
these forms of magic, noting that she performed her magic “with
Exorȝismes and coniurisons | […] | and with rytis of diuerse sacrifice, |
Encens and rikelis cast in-to þe fire” (with exorcisms and conjurings | […]
| and with rites of diverse sacrifice, | incense and relics she cast into the
fire).48 She also has the power to
make þe wyndes for to blowe,

To thondre and liȝte & to hayle and snowe
[…]
And sodeinly sche coude make it reyne,
[…]
And gasten men with sodein erthe-quave,
And turne þe day vnwarly vn-to nyȝt;
And þanne anoon make þe sonne briȝt.49
Make the winds blow,

And thunder and lightning and hail and snow
[…]
And suddenly she could make it rain,
[…]
And frightened men with a sudden earthquake,
And turn the day into night with no warning;
And then again make it bright.
She can “reyse floodis” (raise floods), “Eke ȝonge trees to sere, rote and
rinde, | And afterward make hem, agein[es] kynde | with lusty braunchis
blosme and budde newe” (make young trees wither, rot, and peel, | And
afterward make them, against nature | have lusty branches blossoming and
budding anew),50 and she can do so even in winter,51 which she can also
turn into summer at will.52
Indeed, what seems to unite these concerns is the ways in which Medea
can interfere with time: changing seasons, turning old men young again,
48
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 1625; I 1628–1629.
49
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 1644–1645; I 1646; I 1648–1650.
50
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 1653; I 1655–1657.
51
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 1664.
52
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 1667–1668.
164 A.J. GOLDWYN
making flowers live and die against the seasonal cycles, and, ultimately,
even influencing the heavens: “Clipse þe mone and þe briȝt[e] sonne”
(Eclipse the moon and the bright sun).53 Thus when Lydgate offers an
expanded translation of Guido’s theologically infused refutation of her
ability to enact these phenomena as simply part of ancient myth,54 he is
making explicit what Guido makes implicit and what the other translators
ignore altogether: that the threat of pagan interference in nature is not
just implausible in the sense that it lacks literary verisimilitude and is his-
torically inaccurate, but actually threatens the entire Christian concept of
Christian time that moves inexorably towards salvation. That is, if Medea
can make time go backwards, she can prevent the fulfillment of scriptural
prophecies. In words he attributes to Dionysius the Areopagite, Lydgate
writes:
[…] ouþer [þe] god of kynde

Suffreth þe dethe, ouþer—out of doute—
ƿis rounde worlde whiche is so large aboute
Schal be dissoluid and y-brouȝt to nouȝt
By sodeyn chawnge, hasty as a thouȝt.55
[…] Either [the] god of nature

suffers death, or—without doubt—
this round world which is so large around
Shall be dissolved and brought to nothing
By sudden change, hasty as a thought.
The swelling excursus on environmental control and female incon-

stancy in the Western translations of Benoît stand in sharp contrast to the
condensed account in the Greek version. Thus, a comparative reading of
this scene imbues the small lacuna in the Greek edition with significance
from an ecocritical/ecofeminist perspective as well as from a philological
one. From the latter perspective, such a reading demonstrates that medi-
eval authors opted for a variety of different translations of the passage in
53
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 1675.
54
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 1688–1800, including such notes as “But of Medee, þouȝ þis
clerke Ouide, | Tencrese hir name vp-on euery syde, | List in his fables swyche þinges telle, |
[…] | Yit God forbade we schulde ȝif credence | To swyche feynyng, or do so hiȝe offence”
(I 1707–1709; I 1711–1712).
55
the French source, and that the exclusion of a line in the Greek is most
likely a reflection of the translator’s limited interest in the subject matter
of the passage rather than a manuscript problem.
From the ecocritical/ecofeminist perspective, the Greek translator’s
uncritical and condensed translation of the passage suggests an author
who is not animated by the same concerns (or, at least, to the same degree)
as Guido and Lydgate: he seems unbothered by the destabilizing force of
female magic; moreover, he does not appear even to have considered the
broader social and cultural ideologies underlying such a depiction. The
story of Jason and Medea is the first love affair in a story with many suc-
cessive iterations. It thus also has programmatic force, offering a paradigm
of male–female relations against which subsequent romances can be read.
While Guido and John Lydgate (his recantation notwithstanding) are
explicit in their linking of the female power over nature with female sexual
inconstancy and destructiveness, the difference between them and both
Benoît and the anonymous Greek translator is only one of degree, not of
kind. The latter authors still tell a story, but without the explicit moraliz-
ing excursus or the ekphrastic emphasis on the dangers of female sexuality
and magic.
The marginalization of women and nature by the patriarchy is made
even more explicit later in the story, when the various authors turn from
Medea’s magic powers to a survey of her physical appearance; over the
course of fifteen lines, Benoît describes her ermine dress, her fur-trimmed
coat, and various other accoutrements; he then stops himself with a rhe-
torical expression typical of Benoît and other romance writers of East and
West: “I won’t say anything else, but not in that country nor that realm
was there anyone as beautiful as she.”
The Greek translator is typically terse in his treatment of the scene:
χρυσὸν ἔσωθεν ἔβαλεν, ἐπάνω δὲ μαντίτσιν

καταξαμίτου βελουὲ διὰ λιθομαργάρων.
Ἦτον ἡ κόρη πάντερπνος, ἔλαμπεν ὡς ἀστέρας,
πρόσωπον τρυφερώτερον ῥόδου καὶ τριανταφύλλου,
Μέσα ἐκ τὸ παλάτιον ἦλθε γαληνοτάτη.
ἐξόπισθέν τῆς ἤρχοντο μόναι καὶ δὺο κόραι.
Τὴν ὄψιν εἶχε χαμηλά, ἐντροπιαστὴν ὀλίγον.56
WoT 283–289.
56
166 A.J. GOLDWYN
Her undershirt was of gold, over this, she put on a scarf,

a velvet textile with pearls.
She was entirely beautiful, radiant like a star,
She had a face which was more tender than a flower and a rose
and she came in from the palace very serene;
Behind her alone two girls were coming
Her look was cast-down, slightly modest.
As in Benoît’s work, the focus is on the external: what she is wearing, how
she looks; it is on the rich and exotic exterior of the woman, rather than
on any innate or moral qualities. Guido, however, again transforms this
scene along moralizing lines, this time objecting on the grounds of appro-
priate gender expectations; rather than describe her clothing, he focuses
on the moral implications of female attire:
Quamquam esset virgo nimium speciosa, conata est, ut mulierum est moris,
speciem addere speciei per speciosa uidelicet ornamenta. Quare compta
pretiosis
ornatibus et regio apparatu, decora cuncto gradu, non obesse
familiaritate, ad discumbentium mensas accessit.57
Although she was an extremely beautiful maiden, [she] tried, as is the cus-
tom of women, to add beauty to beauty, that is, through beautiful orna-
ments. For this reason, she came to the tables of the dinner guests decked
out with precious ornaments and royal attire, elegant in her entire
bearing.58
Guido is uninterested in the actual clothing she is wearing; rather, he is

concerned with the significance and moral implications of her dress.
Medea, he suggests, does not dress beautifully because that is what elegant
royal princesses in medieval romances always do, but rather, drawing on
the medieval notion—against Ovid, again—that makeup is a woman’s way
of hiding her imperfections, because she is trying to create a false impres-
sion about herself; Medea is deceptive. Having interpreted Medea’s choice
of clothing and ornamentation this way, it is a small leap indeed to an
indictment of women generally in the form of a moralizing excursus found
neither in his French source nor in the medieval Greek analog:

57

58
Numquid est sapientis se credere constancie puellari aut sexui muliebri, qui
nullis annorum circulis nouit captare constantiam? Cuius animus semper
consistit in motu et precipue inter pubescentes uacillationes antequam
mulier viro facta uiripotens misceatur. Scimus enim mulieris animum semper
virum appetere, sicut appetit material semper formam.59
Is it wise to trust to feminine constancy or the female sex, which has never
been able, through all the ages, to remain constant? Her mind always
remains in motion and is especially changeable in girlhood, before the
woman, being of a marriageable age, is joined to her husband. For we know
the heart of a woman always seeks a husband, just as matter always seeks
form.60
For Guido, unfettered female power is a thing to be feared. Just as he fears

female access to supernatural powers of environmental modification
reserved only for the masculine deity, so too does he fear female sexuality
unconstrained by masculine power in the form of a husband. There is a
link, in Guido’s thinking, between female control of the environment and
female control of sexuality: both are to be feared and both are to be
brought under male control. The story of Jason and Medea, then, can be
seen as an example of how marriage and other forms of male control can,
if only temporarily, constrain these wild powers and channel them in ways
that benefit the powerful males: it is only through Medea, after all, that
Jason is able to win the Golden Fleece.
Guido’s critique extends beyond Medea to encompass women in gen-
eral: they are dangerous and inconstant. Their inconstancy, moreover, is
only one of their faults: Medea, overcome with lust when gazing upon
Jason, utters her first words in the text: “O utinam iste barbarus tam
speciosus tam nobilis michi maritali copula iungeretur” (Oh, I wish this
foreigner, who is as handsome as he is noble, might be joined to me in
marriage),61 she says, an impulse present also in Guido’s various sources
and analogs. Yet again Guido transforms this desire into an indictment of
Medea, who only says this “ut sibi ipsa daret intelligi inculpabili affectione
illud appetere quod culpa et crimine non carebat” (so that she might allow
herself to believe that it was because of innocent affection, that she was
59
60
61
Guido, Historia (1936), 18; Guido, Historia (1974), 16.
168 A.J. GOLDWYN
longing for what was not devoid of sin and guilt),62 that is, her inability to
restrain her sexual desires. Guido then expands this critique to women
more broadly: “Omnium enim mulierum semper est moris vt cum inhon-
esto desiderio virum aliquem appetunt, sub alicuius honestatis uelamine
suas excusationes intendant” (For it is always the custom of women, that
when they yearn for some man with immodest desire, they veil their
excuses under some sort of modesty).63 For Guido, Medea was wrong not
to have gotten married in the first place, but when in the end she does
decide to get married, he faults her for that as well. Guido seems very
much concerned here with limiting female experience, in terms of both
education and marriage. Benoît and the Greek translator depict this scene
in such a way that Medea is the victim, simply overwhelmed with love for
Jason upon seeing his heroic bearing. Guido, however, inverts the agency:
Jason is seen here as the passive victim of Medea’s seductive powers and
feminine wiles.
John Lydgate delivers an even worse picture of women in general and
Medea in particular; in the sections with the headings “Howe Medea first
lovede Iason, and þe insaciate change and mutabilite of women” (How
Medea first loved Jason, and the insatiable changeability and mutability of
women), “Howe women be nevere content in lustes Abitite til þai han
assaiede þe abitite of þere Eye. And þat is, fro man to man” (How women
are never content in lustful appetite until they have satisfied the appetitie
of their Eye. That is, by going from man to man), and for another nearly
hundred lines, he expands on Guido’s critique of women.64 Indeed, in
concluding his analysis of women’s perfidy, Lydgate draws on stock zoo-
morphic and anthomorphic metaphors: “For vnder floures depeint of sta-
bilnes, | Þe serpent dareth of newfongilnes” (For under flowers that appear
stable, | the serpent dares newfangled things).65 That is to say, while
women may appear to be decorative flowers, they are, in fact, dangerous
snakes.
But Lydgate’s expansion on these misogynistic elements contains one
of the most remarkable moments in the vast corpus of translations of
Benoît:
62
63
64
Lydgate, Troy Book, 1823–2096.
65
Lydgate, Troy Book, 2091–2092.
Þus liketh Guydo of wommen for tendite.

Allas, whi wolde he so cursedly write
Ageyn[e]s hem, or with hem debate!
I am riȝt sory in englische to translate
Reprefe of hem, or any euel to saye;
Leuer me wer for her loue deye.
Where-fore I preye hem to done offence;
Þei ben so gode and parfyte euerechon.66
Such things Guido likes to write about women.

Alas, why would he so cursedly write
Against them, or debate with them!
I am right sorry to translate in English
Reproof of them, or to say any evil,
I would rather die for her love.
Therefore I ask them not to take offense;
They are so good and perfect each and everyone.
Lydgate here turns to a refutation of his source material, openly acknowl-

edging that he has no choice but to translate these passages, since they are
in the source material, even while acknowledging that he himself does not
agree. He not only apologizes for translating Guido in this way, he further
explicitly asks that the blame for such words fall on Guido and that he
himself be excused:
Where he [Guido] mysseyth, late hym bere þe wyte;

For it sit wel, þat þe vengaunce byte
On hym þat so þis women haþ offendid;
And ȝif I myȝt if schul[de] be amendid.67
Where he errs, let him bear the weight;

For it is good that vengeance bite
He who has so offended women;
And if I might have done so, it should be amended.
This double game allows Lydgate to elaborately chastise women while

simultaneously distancing himself from that rhetoric; his true position
remains opaque and ambivalent. Whereas the Greek translator, and the
66
Lydgate, Troy Book, I.2097, and again, with a different formulation at I.2116.
67
2119–2122.
170 A.J. GOLDWYN
other translators for that matter, dilate or diminish, moralize or elide as

they see fit, only Lydgate, and only at this moment, offers a meta-narrative
statement about the benefits and limits of translation. Indeed, Lydgate’s
elaborate denunciation of Guido (2115–2135) attempts to mitigate a tour
de force example of the tradition of medieval misogynistic writing, and his
claim that he would have amended it if he could is, of course, belied by the
fact that not only did he not shorten it, he actually greatly expanded it. His
apology and attempt to shift the blame to Guido does, however, demon-
strate that he himself was aware of the charged ideological nature of the
claims he was making.
Yet, as Guido’s other translators demonstrate, there were many other
possible translations available to Lydgate that would have allowed him to
remain true to his source material while also avoiding the verbosity and
vitriol of his own charges; that he did not choose, as other translators did,
alternate translations suggests his essential agreement with the broad con-
tours of Guido’s thought. The German translation, for instance, aims for
a middle ground, translating Guido’s misogyny in abbreviated and less
acidic rhetoric:
Ist is weisheit, zu glouben frewlicher uns[te]tikeit, die noch ny stete wur-

den, und sunderlich zu den zceiten, so sie manbar syn? O konigk Oetes,
hettestu wypliche gebrechlichkeit yn besser achte gehat, so hettestu die
entfŭrunge dyner eynigen tochter yn ein fremde konigkreich mit dynem
grossen schaden nicht beweinet, also das du deiner tachter und dynes gros-
sen schaczes miteinander beraubet pist wurden. Was ist dir nucze gewest die
hute des gotes Mars wider die betriglichkeit und felsch des wyebes?68
Is it wise to trust female inconstancy, which has never been stable, and in
particular in the period when they are marriageable? Oh king Aeëtes, if you
had better considered feminine defectiveness, you would not have lamented
the abduction of your only daughter to a foreign kingdom at your great loss,
that is to say that you were deprived of both your daughter and your trea-
sure at the same time. What use is there of the protection of the god Mars
against the treacherousness and deceptiveness of a woman?
What is particularly interesting about this translation is that the German

translator takes only the misogynistic position. Benoît and the Greek and
Spanish translators omit both the theological objection to Medea’s magic
73–74.
68
and the misogynistic appraisal of female inconstancy. Guido and Lydgate,

by contrast, include both theological and misogynistic objections. The
German translator omits the theological issue, that is, he does not object
to Medea’s magical powers, only to her feminine inconstancy. Unlike
Lydgate, however, he doesn’t inform us of his reasons for this inconsis-
tency. Again, this suggests that the different translators had different ideo-
logical agendas. The Greek and Spanish translators seem uninterested in
moralizing at all, Guido and Lydgate moralize at every opportunity, while
the German translator strikes a middle ground, moralizing only on certain
issues.
Medea and Jason then go to bed, where she loses her virginity to him,
but not before Jason swears an oath that if she helps him get the Fleece,
he will marry her. As usual in Guido’s text, this passage is typically expan-
sive and moralizing, though this time Guido directs his opprobrium at
Jason. This is the only instance in the work in which male behavior in love
is criticized. One important distinction between the critique of Jason here
and the critique of Medea is that, in the case of the former, the critique is
of him as an individual, whereas she becomes a representative of her entire
sex. After describing Jason swearing the oath, Guido writes: “Sed O
deceptiua viri falacia! Die, Iason, quid tibi Medea demum fecisse plus
potuit, que, sui decoris omni honore postposito, tibi suum corpus et spiri-
tum unanimiter tradidit” (But, oh the deceiving falsity of the man! Say,
Jason, what more could Medea ever have done for you, who, when she
had set aside all honorable considerations of decency, gave up her body
and soul together to you),69 and it goes on like this for another twenty
lines, lamenting Jason’s perfidy, before cryptically concluding: “Sed hoc
processit ex tua deceptione flagitium, ut eiusdem ystorie series non obmit-
tit, quod in tui penam periurii et in odium fidei rupte tue, diis uigentibus,
uitam tuam turpi casu diceris finiuisse, de qua hie plura refferre ad presens
omittitur pro eo quod presentis tractatus materiam non contingit” (But
your deception, as the course of this same story does not omit, produced
this shame, namely, that in the punishment of your perjury and in aversion
for your broken faith, since the gods were powerful, you are said to have
finished your life in the misfortune of disgrace. [More about this is not
reported at present because it has no bearing on the present treatise]).70

69

70
172 A.J. GOLDWYN
It seems, therefore, that the bloody end of Jason and Medea’s romance
is known to the author, but is omitted from the account. Instead of carry-
ing on with that narrative, Guido returns to his previous scolding of Medea:
“Set tu, Medea, que tantarum diceris scientiarum illustratione decora, die,
tibi quid profuit notitia legis astrorum, per quam dicitur futura posse pre-
sciri? Si presciencia futurorum uiget in illis, vnde tibi tam enormiter tam
impie prospexisti?” (But you, Medea, who are said to have been so adorned
with the splendor of so many accomplishments, say, what did knowing the
laws of the stars avail, through which it is said the future can be foretold? If
foreknowledge of the future lives in them, why did you provide yourself
such a terrible and wicked future?).71 Guido thus uses Medea’s sad story as
another opportunity to re-assert his theological objections to astrology:
Sed certum est astronomie iudicia super incerto firmata, de quo manifestum
exemplum potenter et patenter in te elicitur, que tibi prouidere per ea nul-
latenus potuisti. Hec enim sunt ilia incerta que faciles ad credendum pro
certo decipiunt et aperto conuoluunt falsitatis errore. In quibus nullus dep-
rehenditur futurorum effectus, nisi a casu forte contingat, cum solius Dei
sit, in cuius manu sunt posita scire tempora temporum et momenta.
It is certain the judgments of astronomy are based upon uncertainty, of which

the manifest example is most powerfully and plainly seen in you, who were in
no way able to see into the future through astronomy. For these are those
uncertain things which, being easy to believe, certainly deceive and confuse
by means of evident error and falsity. In these things no effect of the future is
to be discovered, unless perhaps it is touched on by chance, since it is of God
alone, in whose hand is the knowledge of times and the moments of times.72
As is typical of his method, Guido’s elaborate denunciation first of

Jason and then of Medea offers a greatly expanded moral element to the
brevity of his source: “Jason ensi li otreia | Mais envers li s’en parjura; |
Covenant ne lei ne li tint: | Por ço, espeir, l’en mesavint.” (Jason took this
oath, | but then he perjured himself; | He did not keep his commitment: |
This is the cause, perhaps, of his misfortunes).73 The verbose moralizing,
therefore, does not come from the source, but is an invention of Guido’s
own translation. From these two lines, diluted with the speculative
71
72
73
Benoît, Roman De Troie, 1635–1638.
“espeir,” Guido elaborates not only on Jason’s sin, but on Medea’s false
faith in astronomy.
This moment is also the only one by my count where the Greek author’s
meta-narrative voice emerges:
Πιστότηταν οὐκ ἔδειξεν οὐδὲ ὅρκους εἰς έκείνην,

ἀλλὰ μετ’ ὀλίγον καιρὸν ἀρνήθηκέ την ὅλως.
Χωριάτικον τὸ ἔποικεν, ἐβάρυνεν ἐμενα.
Ἐκείνη, ὡς ἀκούσατε, τοῦ ἔσωσε τὴν ζωήν του,
καὶ ἐκεῖνος τὴν ἀρνήθηκεν—ἔδε ἁμαρτία μεγάλη.
Ὅλοι οἰ θεοὶ τοῦ ὠργίσθησαν, γοργὸν τῆν ἐκδικῆσαν.
Τὸ πῶς δὲ καὶ τί γέγονεν, οὐκ ἔχω χρείαν λέγειν.74
He didn’t show her any fidelity, nor did he keep his oath to her.
But soon he denied her altogether.
He went to his village, this is heavy on me.
She as you heard, saved his life,
and he denied her—this is a great sin.
All the gods were angry at him too, swiftly they avenged her.
But how and what happened, I have no need to say.
718–724. A very close translation of Benoît:

74
Puis la laissa, si fist grant honte.

El l’aveit guardé de morir:
Ja puis ne la deüst guerpir.
Trop l’engeigna, ço peise mei; Laidement li menti sa fei.
Trestuit li deu s’en corrocierent,
Qui mout asprement l’en vengierent.
N’en dirai plus, ne nel vueil faire. (2034–2044)
Lydgate, by contrast, notes that:

Of hir Guydo writ no more wordis mo,
Ne maketh of hir non other mencioun,
By-cause, I trow in myn opinioun,
Þat hir sorwes, ende and euerydel,
Rehersed ben ful openly and wel
[…]
Medea hir both sonys slowe,
For þei we like her fader of visage.
(Lydgate, Troy Book, I 3696–3700, I 3706–3707)
Despite this, however, Lydgate says that because of his falsity in abandoning Medea,
“I can hym not excuse” (I 3709).
174 A.J. GOLDWYN
These denunciations of Jason for breaking his oath and of Medea for
pursuing magic and learning instead of marriage suggest that the authors
and translators of various Trojan War romances across Europe saw their
work as deeply imbued with moral significance. Indeed, Le Roman de
Troie and its various translations were not simply literary works, but part
of the genre known as the mirror of princes; they were commissioned by
royal patrons and imbued with lessons in proper governance, a claim
supported by the genealogical connection of the royal houses of Europe
as the descendants of Trojan refugees.75 Guido makes this connection
explicit in his introduction: “Vt ipsa Troya deleta insurexerit, causa per
quam Romana vrbs, que caput est vrbium, per Troyanos exules facta
extitit uel promota, per Heneam scilicet et Ascanium natum eius, dictum
Iulium” (Though Troy itself was completely destroyed, it rose again,
and its destruction was the reason that the city of Rome, which is the
chief of cities, came into existence, being built and extended by Trojan
exiles, by Aeneas, that is, and Ascanius and his son, called Julius).76
Guido then lists the mythical Roman founders of Britain and France,
Brutus and Francus, before moving on to greater detail about the Trojan
founding of other Italian cities: Venice by Antenor, Sicily by a Trojan
Sicanius, who then left the city to his brother Siculus and went on to
colonize Tuscany and other areas around Sicily such as Naples and Gaeta,
while Diomedes founded Calabria.77 The audience for the Western ver-
sions, therefore, would have considered themselves the descendants of
Trojans, and thus the behavior of the ancient heroes functioned as mir-
rors for proper behavior. Guido, the Sicilian judge, wrote at the commis-
sion of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and believed himself to
be an educator of royalty through the use of moral and theological les-
sons embedded in his text. There is also a tradition that Guido went to
England to visit Edward I, and one of the 150 remaining manuscripts
bears the signatures of King Richard III, James I, and Charles I, all of
whom would have believed in their Trojan descent, as well as, ironically,
the regicide Oliver Cromwell.78 Lydgate’s work was commissioned for,
in his own words,
75
For a synthetic overview of such claims across Europe, see Goldwyn, “Trojan Pasts,
Medieval Presents.”
76
77
Guido, Hitoria (1974), 10. The parallel passage in the German can be found at 71.
78
Schwyzer, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III, 107.
The eldest sone of the noble Kyng

Henri the Firþe, of knyȝthood welle & spryng,
In whom is schewed of what stok he grewe;
The rotys vertu þus can the frute renewe.79
The eldest son of the noble King

Henry the Fourth, reared in good knighthood,
In whom is showed from what stock he grew;
The fruit can thus renew the roots’ virtue.
He then calls the work’s patron, Henry IV, and the work’s addressee, the
future Henry V, those “To whom schal longe by successioun | For to gov-
erne Brutys Albyoun” (To whom shall by a long succession | govern
Brutus’ Albion).80 In making direct reference to the long-standing British
tradition of connecting the royal family to Trojan refugees, Lydgate’s
work thus has added force in demonstrating to the younger generation the
heroic examples set by their illustrious ancestors. Indeed, the moral lesson
of the text is then reiterated:
Of verray kniȝthood to remembre ageyn

The worthynes, ȝif I schal nat lye,
And the prowesse of olde chiyalrie,
to rede in bokys of antiquite,
To fyn only vertu for to swe
Be example of hem, and also for to eschewe
The cursyd vice of ydelnesse.
[…]
To hawnte his body in pleies marcyal.81
Of true knighthood to remember again

The worthiness, if I shall not lie,
And the prowess of old chivalry,
To read in books of antiquity,
To find them only showing virtue,
To be an example of them, and also to eschew
The cursed vice of idleness.
[…]
For his body to frequent martial places.
79
80
81
Lydgate, Troy Book, I 76–83; I 87.
176 A.J. GOLDWYN
Lydgate, like all the others in this tradition, thus inscribes the moral and
didactic elements of his narrative in a theoretical introduction, telling his
royal patrons to follow the example of their Trojan ancestors. With or
without such an introduction, the story of Medea can thus be seen as con-
taining several important lessons, lessons that were culturally constructed
based on specific ideologies about theology, race, and gender, which
Medea, as a pagan barbarian woman, personifies. In the case of the various
translators of The War of Troy, who were explicitly attempting to educate
their royal patrons, the inculcating of cultural norms, proper models of
governance, and ruling ideologies was the very reason for the narration of
the story in the first place, and this is born out in the varying choices each
author made in describing Medea. Since Guido and Lydgate were trying
to educate their patrons, it makes sense that they would interpret the
events they narrated in order to show the meaning underlying an other-
wise simple and well-known tale: that educating women can give them
access to dangerous knowledge, that female sexuality is dangerous and
must be controlled through patriarchal marriage, that foreigners worship
false gods—and, in refusing to spell out the consequences of Jason’s later
betrayal of Medea and her bloody revenge, that contracts with women
need not be honored. This is the imperialist, patriarchal morality these
writers espoused.82 And there is, of course, the unexamined irony that
despite all their condemnation of Medea’s intelligence and magic, the
great hero Jason would have been entirely unable to complete his quest
without her.
But these works are as valuable for classifying the kinds of behaviors
they condemn as for the kinds they celebrate. While each of the translators
and authors condemn Jason and Medea for their inconstancy in matters of
love, none take issue with the fundamental purpose of Jason’s mission: he
82
Indeed, Caroline Dinshaw, writing about a different Troy story, Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde, suggests that “a—perhaps the—major problematic in Chaucer’s narratives [is] the
problem of truth in love. That problematic is very often focused on woman’s truth—her
honesty, her fidelity—or her significant lack of it. Men, of course, can be true, and their
truth or lack of truth is problematized in Chaucer, but unlike a man’s fidelity, a woman’s
truth in love […] constitutes her function within the structure of patriarchal society”
(Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 7). The same focus on Jason’s and Medea’s truthful-
ness seems to apply here: he has the choice of truth or lies, but she, despite having been
entirely truthful, nevertheless becomes the subject of male authors’ unease and
vituperation.
is there, after all, to extract the Golden Fleece, the most valuable natural
resource in the region. If he can bring it back, he can claim his ancestral
throne. Jason’s quest, then, is fundamentally a mission of environmental
exploitation and resource extraction, using the threat of military conquest
(he is traveling with Hercules and the rest of the Argonauts on their way
to burn down Troy, after all) to steal the region’s most valuable natural
resource in order to further his own claims to political power. In this, he
shares much with both Digenis and the Emir: all are elite warriors who
justify their political legitimacy based on their ability to hunt and kill wild
and exotic animals. And as with Digenis and the Emir, these political con-
cerns shape Jason’s engagement with the environment and its indigenous
populations; like them, he too carves out a path of environmental and
human destruction. In order to retrieve the Golden Fleece, he must first
kill a dragon, then two bronze bulls, and finally the Golden Ram itself.
There is a human cost as well, as Jason kills indigenous, indeed autochtho-
nous, people, the men who come to life from the dragon’s teeth. The
Western imperial project of resource extraction regardless of the cost to
indigenous peoples and the environment has a long history, of course, but
this history is in some part the result of racial, gendered, colonial, and
environmental ideologies that have their origins in the distant past and are
continually validated even today.
These judgments reflect the difference between imperial and indige-
nous land use policies. The environmental ideology that animates Jason’s
land use policies is one of active exploitation, of the dispossession of
native peoples, of stealing their wealth, of violence, and of the instrumen-
tal exploitation of indigenous women—he has sex with Medea and makes
free use of her local knowledge of how to survive in this foreign environ-
ment under false promise of marriage, then abandons her in favor of a
wife from his own race. The narrative of Jason and Medea thus operates
at the intersection of a variety of compelling contemporary ideological
concerns about labor and capital, race and gender, colonialism and indi-
geneity, and environmental and land use policies, all of which are brought
to the fore through ecocritical inquiry. As leader of the Argonauts, Jason
has political and military power; as the lover of Medea, he has power over
her sexuality, her children, and, indeed, her life; as the hunter of the
Golden Ram and slayer of various animals, he has power over the natural
environment.
178 A.J. GOLDWYN
Medeas Medieval and Modern

As the medieval authors sought to make the Classics relevant in their own
time by rewriting them in light of their own morals, so too have contem-
porary twenty-first-century authors used the story to clarify their own, and
several of these versions, told by authors variously indigenous, female,
and/or queer, have reinterpreted Medea’s confrontation with normative
patriarchy not as threatening, but as liberating. Indeed, interrogating
these plays from the perspective of feminist or ecocritical narratology simi-
larly forces an ideological reconsideration in light of who is subject and
who is object; that is, from whose perspective the myth is viewed. The
Bengali writer Nabaneeta Dev Sen explicitly dramatizes this difference on
stage in her Medea. Jason and Medea are recast here as Manas and Rupsa,
a couple estranged for five years who meet on a train platform in a suburb
of an unnamed city in India. Rupsa either has amnesia or purposefully
insists on not recognizing Manas, who had abandoned her, while Manas is
either her husband returned after a long time or a man who is accosting a
random stranger. He insists they have children together; she denies ever
having met him, much less having children. This narrative ambivalence
persists throughout the play, and the curtain falls with the issue unre-
solved. The closing stage directions suggest “slowly, darkness, the curtain,
and silence descend upon the stage” followed by a pause, after which “the
lights come on. The director comes to the stage along with the actors. She
says, ‘This play may be called MEDEA; it might also be called JASON.
You can choose to call it what you will. But, tell me, who do you think is
the subject of this drama? To whom does the drama really belong: Jason
or Medea?’”83
The medieval authors came down squarely on the side of Jason; it was
his drama, the story of his heroic labors—indeed, the episode of the
Golden Fleece and his entire encounter with Medea were mere prepara-
tion for his much greater act of heroic destruction in razing Troy for the
first time and thus sparking the Trojan War, which is the main subject of
Benoît and his successors. Medea was merely a marginal and instrumental
accessory to Jason’s story: like the witches in Kallimachos and Livistros,
Medea is valuable as long as powerful men need her magical powers, after
which she is easily disposed of. In the case of Kallimachos and Livistros,
this is manifested in their summary execution; in The War of Troy, it is
Sen, “Medea,” 94.

83
manifested in narrative silencing: Jason returns a hero, first to Colchis and

then to Thessaly:
Καὶ ταῦτα μὲν ἐνταῦθα μοι καὶ μέχρι τούτων στήσω.

εκ τὴν ζωὴν τοῦ Ἰασοῦ πλέον ούδὲν σᾶς λέγω.
ὁ Δάριος ὁ πάνσοφος πλέον τίποτε οὐ λέγει,
ἀλλ’ ὁ εἱρμὸς ἱστόριος στρέφεται πρὸς τὴν Τροίαν.84
That’s all from me on this; I will stop here.

I will say nothing more about the life of Jason.
Darios the all-wise says nothing more,
but the thread of this history turns towards Troy.
While the various sources and analogs all similarly make clear their move
away from narrating the rest of Medea’s story, they do so by omission,
claiming they will move on to describe the Trojan War. Only Lydgate
mentions Medea by name: “Of Medea ȝe gete of me no more | In al þis
boke, nor of hir auenture.”85
If the medieval authors side with Jason, and Nabaneeta Dev Sen takes
a more ambivalent position, Dea Loher’s 1999 play Manhattan Medea is
resolutely focalized through Medea. Loher reimagines Medea’s flight as
that of an illegal immigrant from a war-torn country in Eastern Europe to
New York City, where Jason, a sweatshop owner and slumlord, abandons
her for an American wife of higher social and economic status.86 In empha-
sizing the various ways this modern Medea is marginalized and in priori-
tizing her suffering and struggles, the play recenters the narrative away
from its focus on Jason’s heroism and sympathizes with Medea’s marginal
position as an immigrant, a woman, and a laborer, thus forcing an inter-
sectional postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist critique of the narrative, with
Medea as the victim of exploitation and violence rather than, as in the
medieval versions, their cause. Manhattan Medea, therefore, forces a
reconsideration of the ways in which narrative perspective frames the
ideological implications for understanding the shifting social conventions
surrounding gender, violence, and human agency and responsibility.
Other revisions of the myth emphasize the ways in which subjectivity
effects interpretation while simultaneously pointing to the environmental
84
WoT 738–741. See also 724, above.
85
WoT 3714–3715.
86
Loher, Manhattan Medea.
180 A.J. GOLDWYN
and ecocritical implications of these narratological decisions. Wesley

Enoch, an indigenous Australian of Murri descent, sets his revision, Black
Medea (2000), in a mining town in mid-twentieth-century Australia. The
first choral interlude directly addresses the audience: “But tonight you’re
witness, judge and jury … and we are the story tellers. It’s one person’s
story but somehow it’s about everyone. And this black woman she goes
against everything that seems right … everything that seems proper …
But that’s what makes a story worth telling, doesn’t it?”87 In this version,
Medea is recast as an indigenous woman in a “dusty corner of the world,”
which the chorus describes as “a settlement on the edge of the desert, full
of kids and dogs and nothing much else.”88 While Medea is recast as an
impoverished indigenous woman, Jason is “a blackfella in a suit. Working
his way up the corporate ladder, a city black with his hair wavy, bleached
with saltwater air. Carrying his briefcase and jacket. Sweat marking his new
shirt and his feet baking in leather shoes.”89 The first choral interlude,
moreover, casts the story as not just that of Medea alone, but as represen-
tative of broader social changes among indigenous people forced to choose
between economic advancement on the one hand, and the preservation of
their culture and their environment on the other. What makes this story a
tragedy, in Enoch’s revision, is that Medea loses both anyway.
Jason is recast in this version as an advance scout for a mining corpora-
tion that wants to begin operations on indigenous land, with the ore a
substitute for the Golden Fleece. After helping the miners secure drilling
rights, Medea returns with Jason to the city, where he turns out to be a
violent alcoholic and abuser; the stage directions to the opening section,
which “establish[es] the family dynamics in the story,” say “JASON strikes
MEDEA,” “JASON stands drunk in the house,” and “JASON throws the
beer bottle, smashing it, and throws a chair.”90
As their relationship becomes more combative, Jason turns Medea out,
while she recounts the high cost of what she has done:
MEDEA: As they turned up the bones of my ancestors. You saw how

angry my father was … you heard the wailing of my aunties …
JASON: No … I couldn’t hear over the sound of the bulldozers.91
87
Enoch, Black Medea, 65.
88
89
90
91
In the last monologue before she beats their son to death with a lead
pipe, Medea reflects on the interconnection of the land, her family, and
her culture: “I have known the riches of the whiteman’s world but you
have shown me poverty of the spirit. I gave up a father, a brother, a mother,
a country, I led him to sacred places, I turned my back when they dug up
the earth.”92 Finally, when she kills her son, she conceives of it not only as
revenge on Jason, but also as a mercy towards her son:
I have failed him. He has never known his Land, never left a footprint. I
have abandoned him to follow his father. I have kept him from his songs and
dances. I have denied him his family. Though he has tasted the spirit from
my breast I have refused him his place in the Land. […] if he stays, he will
become a copy of his father. He will grow up bruising the ones he loves, his
children will live in fear, he will be another wandering soul. A mother’s love
will not allow it.93
Thus, Enoch downplays the violence practiced by the indigenous people

on the colonizers—that is, the usual focus, of Medea’s violence towards
Jason—and redirects our gaze towards the much greater systemic violence
of colonizer onto colonized, showing both the devastation inflicted upon
the individual indigenous body—Medea as a victim of intimate partner
violence—as well as the much greater forms of systemic violence: first,
what Gayatri Spivak calls “the epistemic violence” inflicted upon indige-
nous people when the colonizer criminalizes indigenous belief systems,
and second and most visibly, the violence inflicted upon the indigenous
lands through conquest and resource extraction. Indeed, when she flees
from him and returns to her ancestral land, she finds that it has been dev-
astated by the mining company. Medea’s suicide, in this case, comes from
an acute case of what the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn
Albrecht calls “solastalgia,” a neologism that “was created to describe the
specific form of melancholia connected to lack of solace and intense
desolation,”94 that is, the feeling of loss for a home ecosystem that has
been so thoroughly destroyed that one feels the same longing for the lost
home as the exile’s nostalgia:
92
93
94
Albrecht, “Solastalgia,” 44.
182 A.J. GOLDWYN
Solastalgia, in contrast to the dislocated spatial and temporal dimensions of

nostalgia, relates to a different set of circumstances. It is the pain experi-
enced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that
one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation). It is manifest in
an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging
(identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desola-
tion) about its transformation. It is an intense desire for the place where one
is a resident to be maintained in a state that continues to give comfort or
solace.95
Enoch thus transforms Medea’s story into a postcolonial ecoparable exem-

plifying the cost of colonial land use policies on indigenous peoples and
environments. The play’s repeated focus on desolation—on dust and des-
erts—is a manifestation not only of environmental degradation, but of the
concomitant internal desolation felt by Medea when she is estranged from
her land, its peoples, and its customs.
These issues intersect perhaps most forcefully in The Hungry Woman: A
Mexican Medea (1995), a modern adaptation by the self-described “xica-
nadyke” Cherríe Moraga.96 The play takes place in a dystopian future ver-
sion of Phoenix, Arizona, after an “ethnic civil war has ‘balkanized’ about
half of the United States into several smaller nations,” including Africa-
America, the Mechicano Nation of Aztlán, the Union of Indian Nations,
the Hawai’i Nation, the confederacy of First Peoples, and Gringolandia.97
These indigenous national revolutions, however, quickly reverted to a new
form of patriarchy, in which “hierarchies were established between male
and female; and queer folk were unilaterally sent into exile.”98 As a bisex-
ual woman, Medea,99 despite having led the revolution in Aztlán, was sent
to Phoenix, “a city-in-ruin, the dumping site of every kind of poison and
person unwanted by its neighbors.”100 As the play opens, Medea is “an
95
Albrecht, “Solastalgia,” 45.
96
Moraga, Hungry Woman, ix.
97
Moraga, Hungry Woman, 6.
98
99
In this, Medea becomes the literary alter-ego of the author herself: “C’est à la croisée des
identités culturelles et sexuelles que se situe l’auteure comme Chicana lesbienne. C’est l à où
elle situe sa Médée mexicaine” (Carrière, Médée protéiforme, 98).
100
Moraga, Hungry Woman, 6. Aztlán holds a special significance for Moraga as the locus
of Chicano/a national identity. See, for instance, Alicia Arrizón’s analysis in Arrizón, 2000,
esp. 45–48. Arrizón connects Moraga’s setting of The Hungry Woman in Aztlán with a larger
project of creating space within Chicano/a culture for lesbians: “Moraga’s radical perspective
inmate in a prison psychiatric ward.”101 The play thus sets itself out as an
examination of indigeneity, colonialism, and exile; sexuality; and global
capitalism.
As in Black Medea, these issues are inseparable from the environmental
degradation that she sees around her in post-apocalyptic Phoenix.
Recounting the history that led to the revolutions, Mama Sal, Medea’s
grandmother, connects the rise of political oppression to environmental
destruction and exploitative labor practices:
All this born-again-christian-charismatic-apocalyptic-eucalyptus-que-sé-yo

gave fresh blood a la práctica de Nazism […] Mientras cancer clustered
through every Mechicano farm town and low-income urban neighborhood
in Gringolandia. Pesticides poured down like rain upon los trabajadores and
into the water system. […] Los transnational corporate patrones had turned
the whole global economy […] into a poisoned alphabet soup.102
To this list of destruction, another character adds that these resulted in the
loss of “unionized jobs, environmental protection, public health and safety
standards, a living wage.”103 The play thus imagines a future in which the
ideologies Jason represents have come to fruition, and that future is one
of destruction, despair, and violence. As always multiply marginalized,
Medea, an indigenous, working-class, bisexual woman, stands at the nexus
of myriad forms of patriarchal oppression: inside a prison cell within the
larger prison that is Phoenix, the “queer ghetto.”104
Because both Black Medea and The Hungry Woman foreground (and
thus critique) the devastating economic, environmental, and personal
consequences of adhering to a worldview in which Jason’s actions are con-
sidered heroic, Medea’s filicide is transformed from a brutal act of revenge
into one of compassionate sympathy. Indeed, the speeches delivered by
both Medeas explaining their decision to kill their son is remarkably simi-
envisions Aztlán as a space where the male-centered, nationalistic specter of the mythical
Chicano homeland is idealistically transformed into the land of the Chicana-mestiza. This
transformation ‘genders’ the territory as a female brown body, one that will become a place
for all raza, heterosexuals and queers. In proposing queer Aztlán, Moraga extends ideas that
are present through all of her work, expanding the definition of familia in a manner that
provides a sense of location for Chicana lesbians” (45).
101
102
103
104
184 A.J. GOLDWYN
lar. In both cases she justifies her actions by claiming that she is sparing her
son from the horrors of turning into Jason. As in Black Medea she says “if
he stays, he will become a copy of his father,”105 so in The Hungry Woman
she says: “My son needs no taste of that weakness you call manhood. He
is still a boy, not a man and you will not make him one in your likeness!
The man I wish my son to be does not exist, must be invented. He will
invent himself if he must, but he will not grow up to learn betrayal from
your example.”106 Seen from Medea’s perspective, filicide becomes princi-
pally an act of love towards her son rather than an act of revenge against
her husband.
That is not to say that Moraga downplays Medea’s feeling of her own
exploitation by Jason. In Moraga’s version as in Enoch’s, their romance
revises the question of sexual expression, sexual agency, and sexual vio-
lence at the heart of the myth. When Medea demands that Jasón take her
with him from Phoenix back to Aztlán, she refers specifically to the com-
modification of her sexuality in their original agreement:
MEDEA: You raped me. Now pay up.

JASÓN: Oh, Medea. You orchestrated the whole damn thing.
MEDEA: When the prostitute is not paid as agreed, she is raped.
JASÓN: You said it. I never agreed to stay married to you.107
Once again, positioning Medea as subject, that is, viewing her relation-
ship with Jason from her perspective rather than, as do the medieval
authors, privileging his, demonstrates the sexual violence that lies at the
core of their relationship; whereas Enoch stresses intimate partner v iolence
in the form of physical beatings, Moraga couches it in the language of
consent. Indeed, for Moraga, rape is the seminal act of colonial dehuman-
ization; in A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, she looks back at
The Hungry Woman and concludes:
In MeXicano terms, women’s sexuality has occupied a fundamental site of

abjection in the collective imagination since Malintzín Tenepal’s fateful rape
by the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Abjection: de-basement, depravation,
abnormality. We are despised from within and without—our bodies, the
105
106
107
conquered nation. […] For Xicanas (and I must add all women of color who
walk in a remembered history of colonial rape), the enactment of decolo-
nized female desire is the very locus from which abjection arises.108
For Moraga, Medea’s sexual desire is central to her appropriation as an

icon of feminist resistance to patriarchy, first objectified as victims of rape
by the colonizers and then, in the absence of colonizers, objectified still by
the enduring patriarchal culture: “As self-proclaimed desirers we become
bodies of revolt, bodies in dissent against oblivion.”109
Indeed, Medea’s sexual desire also forms part of Moraga’s critique of
capitalism: whereas Medea falls in love with people as subjects, Moraga’s
Jasón is seemingly incapable of conceiving of love without objectification
and the possibility of material gain. He has come back to take their son not
out of affection, but because he, as a white man, has no land claims on the
reservation that is the new country, as Medea tells him: “He is your native
claim. You can’t hold onto a handful of dirt without him. You don’t have
the blood quantum.”110 With his son as with Medea, Jasón is only inter-
ested in the instrumental use of indigenous people, even his wife (for sex),
and his son (to acquire land). And, indeed, in Moraga’s telling, the dispos-
session of native people, of women, of homosexuals, is part of an ideology
that infuses not just Jason, but society and its structures as a whole. When
he tells her that the courts have approved both their divorce and his cus-
tody of their son, Medea says: “Which courts? Those patriarchs who stole
my country?”111 Justice, in Medea’s view, is a structural extension of the
means of controlling rebellious indigenous non-heteronormative women.
Jasón’s claiming of a land not his own as a home contrasts with his
dispossession of Medea from her own; describing Medea and her African-
American lover Luna’s exile from Aztlán, Alicia Arrizón argues that
Phoenix “is the ‘unhomed’ place where all queers and other unwanted
people are relegated. […] The women’s removal from their ancestral land
constitutes part of the tragedy of Medea and her lover.”112
Medea most forcefully asserts this objectification of women when she
analyzes the difference between her son and Jason; the difference, she
concludes, is only one of age: “Betrayal occurs when a boy grows into a
108
Moraga, A Xicana Codex, 41.
109
Moraga, A Xicana Codex, 41.
110
111
112
Arrizón, “Mythical Performaticity,” 46.
186 A.J. GOLDWYN
man and sees his mother as a woman for the first time. A woman. A thing.
A creature to be controlled.”113 It is to spare him from this fate, from
objectifying women, from commodifying the land, from becoming Jasón
and embodying his values, that she kills him. Indeed, in Loving in the War
Years, Moraga says of Llorona, the mythical Mexican filicide who is fused
with the Greek Medea in The Hungry Woman:
The official version was a lie. I knew that from the same bone that first held
the memory of the cuento. Who would kill their kid over some man dumping
them? It wasn’t a strong enough reason. Well, if traición was the reason,
could infanticide then be retaliation against misogyny, an act of vengeance
not against one man, but man in general for the betrayal much graver than
sexual infidelity; the enslavement and deformation of our sex.114
Knowing that “the official version”—that is, the version narrated by men
and adhering to patriarchal ideologies—was false, Moraga seeks out her
own version, a version informed not by men like Guido delle Colonne’s
and John Lydgate’s fear of women’s perceived sexual and emotional vola-
tility, but informed rather by women’s experience under the weight of
patriarchal control—“the enslavement and deformation of our sex.” For
Moraga, Medea’s revenge is not just against Jasón, but against the ideolo-
gies he represents, ideologies that, when taken to their logical ends, result
in heterosexual women being subjugated within the nation,115 while lesbi-
113
Moraga, Loving in the War Years, 145. The passage receives further analysis in Carrière,
Medée protéiforme, 91.
114
Critics, too, have long recognized this critique as being at the heart of both The Hungry
Woman and Moraga’s broader corpus. According to María Teresa Marrero, “Rather than
losing her son to the symbolic Chicano patriarchal Order, Medea takes drastic action—sym-
bolically killing two parts of herself: that of mother and of lesbian lover. The play suggests,
however, that her Mexicana/Chicana self is indelible and therefore not subject to erasures.
The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea enacts the problematic juncture of lesbian mother-
hood (of a son), lesbian desire, and cultural exile imposed by an overriding machista order”
(“Out of the Fringe,” 143). Similarly, Arrizón notes, even as “Medea embodies the power
and resistance of the native woman who feels a profound connection with her ‘lost’ territory”
within the independent and racially homogenous Aztlán, her non-heteronormativity repre-
sents an unacceptable transgression of the sexual mores in Chicano/a national identity: “As
a lesbian, Medea laments the dangers of homophobia in the chicano community bound by
the hegemonic limits of patriarchal and heterosexist reproductions” (Arrizón, “Mythical
Performativity,” 48).
115
Jasón offers to take Medea back to Aztlán under the condition that she “give up the
dyke” (33) and later, when Jasón says she can return as his “ward,” she rejects him by
ans—that is, women who have no need of men for sexual gratification—
are exiled, jailed, and denied custody rights over their children. From the
Marxist perspective, too, these ideologies result in labor exploitation and
poverty, and, from an ecocritical perspective, in the kinds of environmen-
tal degradation that Mama Sal identified earlier in the play and that are
embodied in the economic wasteland that Phoenix has become. As a polit-
ical prisoner, then, Moraga’s Medea suffers from the nostalgia of the exile,
but as a woman whose life and identity is rooted in Aztlán as a motherland
and as a locus of ecological and personal development, she suffers from the
solastalgia of the environmental exile as well.
Classical reception theory holds that the ideologies and values of post-
classical cultures can be seen in how they domesticate ancient cultural
production to their own worldview. The writers of medieval versions of
the myth—focalizing their tales through Jason and reflecting the patriar-
chal societies in which they worked and which they celebrated—reinforced
a variety of misogynist, racist, and xenophobic positions regarding wom-
en’s education, sexual agency, and religious expression. But told from
Medea’s perspective by a Murri author such as Enoch or a xicanadyke such
as Moraga (or a European feminist such as Dea Loher), the events take on
a different meaning. A terrible force of irrational and uncontrollable vio-
lence for medieval authors, Medea in modern tales narrated by marginal-
ized authors becomes a deeply sympathetic figure, and the murder of her
child—anathema to Euripides and altogether elided by medieval authors—
becomes a source of sympathy for a woman strained by intersecting forces
of environmental, economic, ethnic, gendered, and sexuality-based forms
of oppression. The authors of medieval romance consistently narrate from
hegemonic positions, silencing the voices of the marginalized women—
including Medea, but also the other women and marginalized charac-
ters—and thus denying them the ability to tell their own story. To hear the
story from their own perspective is to subvert the patriarchal value systems
that can only be celebrated through the silencing of dissenting voices and
the omission of the narrated experiences of the characters on whose vio-
lent exploitation narratives of masculine heroism are built, or, as Irma
Mayorga writes in “Homecoming,” her afterword to The Hungry Woman,
a “viable means through which the legacies of patriarchy, homophobia,
and xenophobic nationalisms can be counteracted with feminist visions
acknowledging the experience of women under patriarchy: “I am not your Juárez whore,
Señor. A woman is nothing in Aztlán without a husband” (68).
188 A.J. GOLDWYN
and queer perspectives of the ‘near future.’”116 Though the medieval writ-
ers ignore it, Enoch and Moraga tie Medea’s personal experience of
oppression to environmental degradation. Whether in the mines dug on
ancestral cemeteries or in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of a future dysto-
pian American Southwest, exploitation of women is concomitant with
exploitation of the environment.
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———. 2016. The Trojan War from Rome to New Rome: The Reception of
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CHAPTER 5
Byzantine Posthumanism: Autopoiesis,

Sympoiesis, and Making Kin in the Gardens
of Romance
In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” a 1986 semi-facetious essay that

has since become a touchstone of ecocritical and feminist thought,1 Ursula
Le Guin traces the origins of narrative back to the twin experiences of
hunting and gathering. Men, she argues, unburdened by babies and the
care of the home, went hunting, while women gathered oats, grains, veg-
etables.2 Storytelling, she then suggests, developed out of the greater nar-
rative possibilities of describing the dangers of the hunt as opposed to “a
really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and
then another, and then another, and then another, and then another.”3
From this, she concludes that the hunter’s story “not only has Action, it
has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women
in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the
thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it,
have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their
story. It’s his.”4 Le Guin aims her critique at a certain kind of narrative
mode that celebrates the killing capacity of hunters over the life-sustaining
capacity of gatherers, for whom the carrier bag—used to transport grains
and children—rather than the sword or spear, is the primary tool. It is no
coincidence, either, in this regard, that Le Guin genders these stories (“It’s
1
In Dancing at the Edge of the World, since reproduced in Glotfelty and Fromm 1986.
2
The case is made at length in Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, wherein she further
argues that “the hierarchy of meat protein reinforces a hierarchy of race, class, and sex” (53).
3
Le Guin, “Carrier Bag,” 149.
4

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6_5
192 A.J. GOLDWYN
his”), for these kinds of narratives celebrate a particularly gendered way of

interacting with the world. As a feminist writer, Le Guin writes that “so
long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon
the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never
thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it.”5 Though science
fiction (the genre with which her own work is most associated, if uneasily)
is the nominal subject of her critique, it is as easily applicable to the medi-
eval romances, which consistently narrate events from the perspective of
male protagonists, focusing principally on the people and animals they kill
and silencing the voices of the far more numerous marginal characters
whose existences are only narrated insofar as their lives and deaths relate
to those of the hero.6 Focalizing the events of the stories through the eyes
of these men—and thus celebrating and legitimizing the kinds of violence
that their construction of a heroic masculinity entails—is perhaps the ulti-
mate manifestation of patriarchy within these texts. No other characters
have their own subjectivity; all exist only in terms of their relation to the
hero. This is true in the medieval Greek romance as well, though while the
great male hero-killers are the focus and their adventures are of principal
importance, there is space for the gatherers as well. However, what these
women do in their gardens besides loll about and look pretty while wait-
ing for the men to come and take them away is unknown and, indeed,
unknowable, since their residence in these gardens is only narrated from
the perspective of a patriarchal narratology: these women’s lives are only
narrated where they intersect with men’s. That is to say, the only moment
of a woman’s life in the garden that is narrated is the one in which the man
takes her from it.
As the medieval example of Christine de Pisan and the modern exam-
ples of Wesley Enoch and Cherríe Moraga demonstrate, these same sto-
ries, narrated from positions of alterity, reveal starkly different ideological
perspectives and challenge previous assumptions about who and what
constitute the proper subject of narrative and what kinds of values such
narratives propagate. Le Guin finds a solution to this patriarchal narratol-
ogy in prioritizing a different tool—not the pointed weapon used by male
5
6
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s posthumanist analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe notes the
ways in which her male interlocutors consistently attempt to try to silence her or, barring
that, lure her into speech that would condemn her to death, Medieval Identity Machines
154–187, esp. 158.
BYZANTINE POSTHUMANISM: AUTOPOIESIS, SYMPOIESIS, AND MAKING KIN… 193
hunters, but the “carrier bag” that is the subject of her title: the (modern)
novel, she writes, “is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story”; “the natu-
ral, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag …
holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
[…] Instead of heroes they have people in them.”7 That is to say, by
decentering the narratives from the perspectives of their heroes, by reject-
ing the concept of the hero as a being separate from the tangled web of
relationships in which humans are enmeshed, marginalized voices can
begin to be heard, and the hero, once the center, becomes one node in a
network of interrelated characters, neither greater nor lesser than any
other: “You put him in a bag,” she writes, “and he looks like a rabbit, like
a potato.”8 Le Guin, therefore, advocates for a threshold of narrative sig-
nificance that accounts for women’s lives even when there are no men
around. She put this theory into practice in her novel Lavinia (2008),
which narrates the life of Aeneas’ wife outside the confines of Virgil’s
patriarchal narratology, in which she appears only in instrumental relation
to her future husband. Lavinia can thus be seen in the context of both Le
Guin’s larger critique of patriarchal narratology and in concert with other
feminist revisions of ancient mythology, which includes not only Moraga’s
and Enoch’s revisions of Medea, but also a variety of other imaginary
autobiographies told from the perspectives of ancient women: Christa
Wolf’s Cassandra (1988), Amanda Elyot’s The Memoirs of Helen of Troy
(2005), Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2006), and Katharine Beutner’s
Alcestis (2011) are all instances of such feminist reappropriation.9
Though Le Guin is explicitly talking about narrative modes, ideologies,
and perspectives, the essay’s inclusion in The Ecocriticism Reader suggests
its influence on subsequent thinking about the connection between litera-
ture and the environment, for Le Guin’s critique is not simply narratologi-
cal, but also ontological: it is a critique of a certain way of being in the
world that celebrates the individual who can best destroy and subdue the
world around him, and proposes an alternative narrative model that cele-
brates community and kinship rather than individuality and conflict. In
7
8
9
This tradition is in many regards as old as the myths themselves: Euripides’ Trojan Women
and, later, Ovid’s Heroides prioritize women’s perspectives of stories focusing principally on
men. Phillip Parotti’s The Greek Generals Talk (1986) and The Trojan Generals Talk (1988)
can be seen in a similar tradition, though, by focusing on men lower in the military hierarchy,
they emphasize a marginalization based on class rather than gender.
194 A.J. GOLDWYN
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway
offers a similar critique, this time, however, not from a literary perspective
but from a posthuman one: “Ursula Le Guin taught me the carrier bag
theory of storytelling and of naturalcultural history. […] In a tragic story
with one real world-maker, the hero, this is the Man-making tale of the
hunter on a quest to kill and bring back the terrible bounty. This is the
cutting, sharp, combative tale of action that defers the suffering of gluti-
nous, earth-rotted passivity beyond bearing.”10 For Haraway, Le Guin’s
theories regarding fiction can be applied to the real world and its justifica-
tion of the ideologies that have led to ecological destruction.
If the Anthropocene is the current era of geological time, then posthu-
manism is its determining ideology, and Haraway is the scholar with
whose work it is most closely associated. As with any ethical or philo-
sophical term, the definition of posthumanism is itself the subject of much
debate,11 but it is often used in the context of Haraway’s critique of
humanism’s assumption that the human is an autonomous being physi-
cally and intellectually. In her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which
brought the concept to widespread attention, Haraway, like Le Guin,
draws on contemporary science fiction writing to define cyborgs as
“creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds

10
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 39.
11
For a history of the term, see Wolfe, What is Posthumanism, xi–xix. Wolfe formulates the
clearest definition of his use of the term: “[Post-humanism] forces us to rethink our taken-
for-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affec-
tive states of Homo sapiens itself, by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium
of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of ‘bringing forth a world’—ways that
are, since we ourselves are human animals, part of the evolutionary history and behavioral
and psychological repertoire of the human itself. But it also insists that we attend to the
specificity of the human—its ways of being in the world, its ways of knowing, observing, and
describing—by (paradoxically, for humanism) acknowledging that it is fundamentally a pros-
thetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that
are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is” (xxv).
Alaimo offers a similar definition, posing some of the questions pertinent to a broader post-
human inquiry: “What can it mean to be human in this time when the human is something
that has become sedimented in the geology of the planet? What forms of ethics and politics
arise from the sense of being embedded in, exposed to, and even composed of the very stuff
of a rapidly transforming material world? Can exposing human flesh while making space for
multispecies liveliness disperse and displace human exceptionalism? What modes of protest,
and what pleasures, do environmentalists, feminists, and other queer subjects improvise?
(Alaimo, Exposed, 1).
ambiguously natural and crafted.”12 That is to say, the concept of the

cyborg is posthuman in that it dissolves the borders that separate the
organic from the inorganic, since, being a hybrid combination of both, it
renders meaningless the categories that distinguish these elements as sepa-
rate.13 The human–machine binary is not the only one that posthumanism
dissolves; from a broader perspective, too, cyborgism problematizes
conceptions of nature, the natural, and the unnatural, since human inter-
action—and here is the connection with the Anthropocene—has pro-
foundly altered almost all aspects of the material world: from monumental
projects such as the building of cities and the leveling of forests to micro-
scopic changes such as DNA editing and genetically modified plants and
animals, humans have brought technology and nature into inseparable
entanglement. From the posthuman perspective, then, the divide between
human and nature, between human and technology, between technology
and nature, are meaningless boundaries, transgressed in such an irrevoca-
ble way that each is part of all. As the cyborg is fundamentally the conflu-
ence of the human and the technological, humans, too, she argues, are no
longer immune to such technological interventions; indeed, the premise
12
Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 149.
13
Haraway’s is perhaps among the more flexible definitions of the term, particularly in any
application that is not concerned with technofuturism and the debate about consciousness as
being embodied or disembodied within organic or inorganic material. N. Katherine Hayles,
for instance, argues that “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute
demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and
biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (How We Became Posthuman, 3).
Nevertheless, she holds out the possibility for other models of posthuman subjectivity not
concerned with the posthuman subject as “a collection of heterogenous components, a
material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and
reconstruction” (How We Became Posthuman, 3) by allowing that “the construction of the
posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg […] the defining characteristics
involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components”
(How We Became Posthuman, 4). The issue, as with Haraway’s posthumanism, is one of sub-
jectivity, and the ways in which claims of what is and is not human have participated in
mechanisms and ideologies of oppression: “Feminist theorists have pointed out that [the
liberal humanist subject] has historically been constructed as a white European male, pre-
suming a universality that has worked to suppress and disenfranchise women’s voices; post-
colonial theorists have taken issue not only with the universality of the (white male) liberal
subject but also with the very idea of a unified, consistent identity, focusing instead on
hybridity” (How We Became Posthuman, 4). In this regard, Hayles’ work is applicable to a
Byzantine posthumanism that, though disentangled from debates about cybernetics and
information technology, is nevertheless invested in questions of subjectivity, marginalization,
hybridity, and the ways in which power dynamics operate within medieval texts.
196 A.J. GOLDWYN
of “A Cyborg Manifesto” is that cyborgs are not an external other, but are,
in fact, us. Technology is taken into the body as, for instance, in cochlear
implants, contact lenses, and pacemakers, while the human mind is exter-
nalized into technologies such as smartphones and computers.
For Haraway, however, these changes are more than just physical: the
“cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.”14 That is to say, within
the cyborg resides as much an ideological critique of economic, gendered,
racial, and environmental histories as a description of the changing physi-
cality of bodies and environments:
In the traditions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist,

male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the
appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradi-
tion of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the rela-
tion between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in
the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and
imagination.15
The cyborg, by contrast, opens up different interpretive possibilities for

understanding both past and future: “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she argues, is
“an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for respon-
sibility in their construction.”16 The clearest manifestations of this new
conception of the world she envisions are the boundary breakdowns
between natural and artificial/technological and human and animal.17
Haraway explores these porous boundaries in Staying with the Trouble,
where she posits the Chthulucene as a more accurate term than
Anthropocene. Drawn from chthon, the Greek word for earth, and allud-
ing to H.P. Lovecraft’s octopus–dragon–human hybrid Chthulu, the term
14
15
16
17
Which she bases on modern science: “By the late twentieth century in United States
scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last
beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks—language
tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of
human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed,
many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other liv-
ing creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness;
they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and
culture” (Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 151).
“entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active

entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-
human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.”18 Haraway argues against the
Anthropocene because that term suggests a separation, a breach, from
previous times; the Chthulucene, by contrast, embraces what she calls
“tentacular thinking,” whereby everything is linked, networked, joined,
entangled, with every other thing and the boundaries between things have
become so transgressed that to conceive of them as separate entities dis-
torts perceptions of the world and the causes and effects of human action
in it. From this posthumanist perspective, the zoomorphic and antho-
morphic metaphors and similes with which the narrators describe the men
and women of romance take on new significance; figurative language used
to compare unlike things or to demonstrate a shared aspect among seem-
ingly dissimilar things reflects Haraway’s posthuman vision of the mean-
inglessness of categorical distinctions between boundary-transgressing
bodies.
Posthumanism, then, like ecocriticism, began as a critique of contem-
porary literature and culture but has since been adopted by scholars work-
ing in earlier periods of literary and cultural production: Haraway can
claim that “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are
all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in
short, we are cyborgs,” but the roots of these ideas are not at all modern.19
Indeed, the seminal double issue of the journal postmedieval posed the
question “when did we become post/human?” and answered it from a
variety of perspectives, including those that focused on boundary trans-
gressions in general and cyborgism in particular.20 None of these works,
however, mention Byzantium or Byzantine Studies, although hybrid and
transgressive constructions have their origins in the pre-Byzantine Greek
tradition—the chimera was, after all, an ancient Greek monster—while the
cyborg and other boundary-crossing technologies are well attested in
Byzantine literature as well.
Like ecocriticism, a Byzantine posthumanism is aided by scholarship
that has already sought to integrate these concepts into the critical
18
Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” 160.
19
20
On medieval cyborgism, see, for instance, Evans, “Our Cyborg Past”; Glimp, “Moral
Philosophy for Cyborgs”; both Harris, “Mechanical Turks” and Lightsey, “The Paradox of
Transcendent Machines” examine related subjects of the interpenetration of technology and
organic materiality.
198 A.J. GOLDWYN
iscourse of Western, and particularly medieval English, literature. Jeffrey

d
Jerome Cohen’s Medieval Identity Machines, for instance, introduced the
term into medieval studies in 2003, arguing that
Donna Haraway propounded in her antitechnophobic “Cyborg Manifesto”

that the body does not end at the culturally imposed limit of skin, but has
seeped already into a diffuse material world. Contemporary theorists of
identity tend to label this body “posthuman,” implying that its challenge to
the boundedness of the flesh is a possibility enabled only through a recent
proliferation of technologies. As my conjunction of disabled, humoral, and
cybernetic bodies has already implied, however, medievalists have long
known better.21
Cohen examines, for instance, the ways in which chivalry—as the ety-
mology of the word itself implies—is a synthetic and synergistic combi-
nation of human and horse; the socially constructed identity of the
knight requires both human animal and non-human animal.22 That is,
the word knight signifies not the man, but the man–horse hybrid. Adding
in the identity-building nature of technology, the knight exists at the
intersection of human, horse, and technology in the form of armor and
weaponry. The knight, then, is neither human nor non-human animal
nor inanimate material, but a boundary-crossing synthesis of all three—
certainly posthuman, perhaps even a cyborg.
Nor is this hybridization limited to individual identities; in Hybridity,
Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain, Cohen analyzes the ways in
which early British historiographers struggled to reconcile the deep inte-
gration of the Normans with the indigenous populations of England,
21
Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, xiii. As with ecocriticism, Cohen further argues that
posthumanism operates at the intersection of the various other foci in identity studies and
post-structuralist critique: “Feminist critics have pointed out that the problem with this awe-
struck model of the body is that it elevates to universal status a fleshly form that presents itself
as unmarked by sexual difference, but is in the end inherently and unthinkingly male. Queer
theorists have demonstrated that this archetypal figure is synonymous with the heterosexual
body, making it normalizing rather than normal. Postcolonial and critical race theory agree
that the universal body universally carries the assumption of whiteness; only colored or ethnic
bodies are inscribed with difference, which thereby becomes deviation. Scholars in the
emerging discipline of disability studies have argued that this particular representation of the
body is ablist. Not everyone has a body conforming to the dominating somatic ideal”
(Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, xii).
22
Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, 45ff.
offering instead a vision of history that prioritized “the enduring distinc-

tiveness of the earth’s populations.”23 Cohen argues that the real history
of population interaction was far more complicated; he writes that the
historian Bede’s
immigrant ancestors may have eradicated or marginalized many of Britain’s

indigenes, but they are just as likely to have merged with insular popula-
tions, spurring mutual assimilations and profound transformations. The
Normans may have conquered England and annexed Wales, but they also
vanished in the process, assimilating to—as well as deeply altering—native
ways. Between imagined or desired absolutes like “Angle” and “Briton,”
“English” and “Norman,” “Christian” and “Jew” flourished recalcitrant
impurities.24
Though more explicitly postcolonial than posthuman, Cohen’s analysis of

English historiography, concerned as it is with analyzing the “hybrid
geographies [that] burgeoned in the wake of migration, conquest, and
colonization” and that “proliferated at interstices, in border zones, along
margins,” nevertheless engages in posthumanistic discourse with regard to
the ways in which historiographers’ attempts to “limn[] and thereby
solidif[y] the borders of collective identities” nevertheless “yield glimpses
of a roiling interpenetration of peoples and cultures, tempestuous inter-
mediacies that undermine clean separations.”25
In a Byzantine context, the writers of romance similarly struggled with
the enduring problem of hybrid identities: the eponymous hero and his
father the Emir in Digenis Akritis, for instance, represent the difficulties of
hybridizing national or religious identities, especially since much of their
conception of their own self-identity is defined in opposition to the other-
ness variously based on gender, species, religion, and class. The Emir, for
instance, cannot marry his wife because she is Christian and he is not, but
the moment he converts, he receives a letter from his mother that she will
be killed by his former co-religionists for his apostasy. The Emir, his in-
laws, his birth family, indeed, both the Christian and Muslim communities
depicted in the text as a whole, are unable to integrate hybrid identities.
The Emir must choose: to be integrated into society (any society) he can-
not be both, since religious identity in the text is defined from within itself
23
Cohen, Hybridity, 1.
24
25
200 A.J. GOLDWYN
and, equally important, in opposition to the religious other. Assuming one

identity or the other, therefore, clarifies who he is and how he is to be
engaged both by the group he has joined, who now treat him as kin, and
the one he has rejected, who, no longer treating him as kin, literally seek
to kill his family.
Figures such as Digenis, meanwhile, who are defined by their hybrid
boundary-transgressing identities, can exist in neither Christian nor
Muslim society, and therefore are left in the in-between space in the mid-
dle.26 Like Digenis, Maximou—the story’s other iconic inhabitant of the
borderlands—is a figure of transgressively hybrid identity. Her identity as
a warrior cannot co-exist with her identity as a woman; one must give way
to the other, and Digenis, as the enforcer of patriarchal order as well as the
embodiment of a certain kind of deviance from it, establishes the primacy
and inescapability of her femininity by first raping and then killing her.
Within the context of these exclusivist identities, it is fitting that there is
no physical space within either society for the offspring of this union:
Digenis inhabits the border spaces by choice and by necessity; his hybrid
identity places him beyond the scope of either.
Cohen argues that the origins of monsters and the monstrous exist in
these liminal figures who cannot easily be classified, manifesting in such
“spectacular phenomena as prodigies, transformed persons, sorcerers, bes-
tiality, tempests of blood, monsters, reveries of dismemberment, cadavers
possessed of abiding life. These arresting figures embody the medialities
precise language could not well express. Refusing the chaste solitude of
singular categories, they intermixed and confounded all that was supposed
to be held apart.”27 From this, Cohen concludes that monsters and the
monstrous are terms applied to those hybridities that “enticed identities to
mutate into forms seemingly beyond the borders of the humanly possible,
forms that in fact dwelled alarmingly close to home.”28 In this light,
Digenis becomes again a model for a Byzantine posthumanism, for the
line between monstrousness and heroism is as blurry as any other. A prod-
igy, his physical appearance is ultimately protean—wearing a feminine kilt
and the dismembered body parts of a lion and covered in blood and gore
one moment, wearing the expensive raiment of a Byzantine nobleman the
26
For an introductory exploration of hybridity in the larger context of the “spatial turn” in
Byzantine Studies, see Veikou, “Space in Text, Space as Text,” esp. 150–152.
27
28
next—and the figurative language used to describe him betrays him as the
apex of the civilized human and predatory animal, as chimera and mon-
ster. He is monstrous, too, in his capacity for destruction: unarmed and
alone, he slays wild animals and then humans in large numbers. Set apart
from Byzantine society, equally feared and revered by it, Digenis is both a
violator of cultural norms and at the same time an enforcer of them,
embodying both society’s contradictions and the fullest expression of its
values.
Perhaps the most paradigmatic example of the posthuman in the medi-
eval Greek romance, however, is the figure of the tetraktys from Rhodanthe
and Dosikles.29 The passage is a marvel of posthuman boundary transgres-
sions and monstrous hybridities: it is humans transformed into a single
non-human—perhaps even inhuman or monstrous—being with either
multiple heads or multiple bodies (“for four bodies could be seen | beneath
what appeared to be the one head”),30 embracing humans transformed
into an image on a woven fabric (“And I have often seen on many robes |
[…] | such a design from an inventive painter | truly an invention of the
art of weaving”),31 humans into animals (“a single-faced creature made up
of four animals, | a lion and lions”),32 and people into plants (“And it
would have been easier to disentangle | two branches for long intricately
intertwined | than the parents intertwined with their children”).33
Haraway’s “tentacular thinking” works here on levels literal and meta-
phorical: the arms, fingers, hair, and bodies of the happy families are inter-
twined with one another; as a sartorial metaphor, they become the
interwoven threads of the fabric; and as a biotic metaphor, women become
plants, men become predators, and families become polycephalous and
polysomatic monsters. The happy denouement of the romance is con-
tained in a celebratory image in which the boundaries that separate mul-
tiple unlike things collapse together into a single being. Indeed, the
romances as a whole, from this perspective, are fundamentally about the
dissolution of the male–female binary, as the narratives themselves focus
on the attempts of the lover and beloved to join into a single entity—
socially through marriage and physically through sex—and find their
29
For the tetraktys, see also 103–105 in this volume.
30
R&D 9.318–319.
31
R&D 9.320, 324–325.
32
R&D 9.330–331.
33
R&D 9.339–341.
202 A.J. GOLDWYN
resolution in this unity, following what Northrup Frye in The Secular

Scripture refers to as “the principle that the G-string comes off last.”34
What joins such seemingly diverse and unmedieval concepts as Le
Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction and Haraway’s vision of posthumanism
and tentacular thinking in the Chthulucene is an overriding concern with
sustainability and kinship.35 The heroic ideology that is the subject of Le
Guin’s critique is the same construction of masculinity—individual, sepa-
rate, outside of the human laws governing society and the scientific laws
that govern nature—that leads to oppression, dispossession, and degrada-
tion. To read medieval romances, then, from a position of posthumanism,
is to see the emergence of a different model for a sustainable and humane
ecoethics based on expanded notions of who and what constitute kin;
indeed, the combination of an ecocritical and posthumanistic analysis of
the medieval romances offers a vision of a world in which the boundaries
between the human, the natural, and the technological are dissolved, and
along with them the ideologies that center and valorize some characters at
the expense of the silencing and oppression of others.
In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway characterizes these two models as
autopoietic and sympoietic, creation by the autonomous individual self in
competition and strife with everyone who is not kin and co-creation
through networked relations among the unbounded constituents of larger
ecological, technological, and human naturecultures, all of whom are
kin.36 The autopoietic logic of the past (here connected with patriarchy,
34
Frye, Sacred Scripture, 52.
35
With attention to Stacy Alaimo’s critique of the way the term “sustainability” has been
co-opted by corporate and political interests and, in particular, how the proliferation of the
term in the United States is “in part driven by the desire to mark the country’s resources as
belonging to some groups and not others,” and thus with the potential to, among other
concerns, “be fueled by anti-immigrant fervor as well as by the desire to entrench systemic
inequalities during a time of economic instability” (Alaimo, “Sustainable This, Sustainable
That,” 558). This is part of her broader investigation into the ways in which “Western, Euro-
American thought has long waged ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ against LGBTQ peoples, as well
as women, people of color, the colonized, and indigenous peoples” (Alaimo, Exposed, 41).
36
Following the definition in Dempster, “A Self-Organizing Systems Perspective,” v:
“Autopoietic (self-producing) systems are autonomous units with self-defined boundaries
that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable. Sympoietic (collectively-
producing) systems do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and
control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the
potential for surprising change. Since they cannot be identified by boundaries, sympoietic
systems must be identified by the self-organizing factors involved in their generation.”
humanism as human-centered earth-domination, and capitalism), she

argues, has led to the current crisis of the Anthropocene: “Bounded (or
neoliberal) individualism amended by autopoiesis is not good enough fig-
urally or scientifically; it misleads us down deadly paths.”37 By contrast,
sympoiesis
is important for thinking about rehabilitation (making livable again) and

sustainability amid the porous tissues and open edges of damaged but still
ongoing living worlds like the planet earth and its denizens in current times
being called the Anthropocene. If it is true that neither biology nor philoso-
phy any longer supports the notion of independent organisms in environ-
ments, that is, interacting units plus contexts/rules, then sympoiesis is the
name of the game in spades.38
The autopoietic seeks to exclude others from the conception of self and
kin, therefore justifying killing and subjugating them, while the sympoi-
etic model seeks to expand—to make kinship with others—in order to
bring them into the privileged and protected sphere that covers those con-
sidered to be within the in-group.
Autopoiesis and Sympoiesis in the Tale of Achilles

Whereas the wild frontier spaces occupied by the hunters in Digenis and
elsewhere in the tradition are autopoietic, sympoiesis is practiced in the
gardens, where human, posthuman, natural, and post-natural beings exist
in a state of sustainability and harmony. This contrast between autopoiesis
and sympoiesis is exemplified in the Tale of Achilles, an anonymous
romance of late—if uncertain—date.39 Called “un Digénis baptisé d’un
nom classique”40 by an early editor and, more recently and in more scien-
tific language, a poem “which follows the model of Digenis Akritis quite
closely, particularly in its apparent efforts to balance the macho heroism of
Chapter 3 of Staying with the Trouble is devoted to sympoiesis; autopoiesis is a recurring

theme in Wolfe, What is Posthumanism.
37
38
39
Beaton suggests only that the work may be the earliest of the vernacular romances, with
others dating it more specifically to the second half of the fourteenth or early fifteenth cen-
tury, for which, see Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 245 n.7.
40
Hesseling, Achilléide Byzantine, 9.
204 A.J. GOLDWYN
an all-male world with the conventions and interests of the more literary
romance. [… I]t is at least possible that this romance represents a bridge
from the mixture of heroic and romance elements in Digenis to the fully
fledged vernacular romance.”41 Though the manifestation of this influence
can be seen in a variety of aspects relating to the poem, the importance of
the influence from ecocritical and posthuman perspectives is in its treat-
ment of the natural world and, specifically, the zoomorphic and antho-
morphic metaphors found in the poem. As in the Digenis, the eponymous
hero of the Tale of Achilles first proves his valor in combat (though in war
rather than in hunting), washes and cleans his body, then meets and cap-
tures a beautiful girl. Much of this is done, moreover, through the use of
zoomorphic metaphors. Thus, as in the Digenis, the same parallels and
power hierarchy are affirmed: the hero proves that he is the most powerful
predator, first over men and nature, then over women, and the naturalistic
metaphorical constructs used to describe his dominance in these three
spheres demonstrate their subjection to elite men. But also as in Digenis,
the scenes of warfare are contrasted with the luxurious garden in which
Achilles’ (unnamed) future wife resides, thus offering contrasting models
of engagement with the world.
Achilles’ posthuman attributes are evident from the very first depiction
of him in the text:
μακρὺς ἔναι ὡς κυπάρισσος, λιγνὸς ὡς πρώτη μέση.

ἐπάνωθεν καὶ κάτωθεν ἀνοικτὸς ὥσπερ λέων,
[…]
ἐφόριε δὲ καὶ στέφανον ἐκ λίθων καὶ μαργάρων,
τοῦτον ποσῶς οὐκ ἔρριπτεν ἀπὸ τῆς κεφαλῆς του.
Ἄσπρον ἦτον τὸ στῆθος του μάρμαρον ὥσπερ κρύον,
εἶχεν βραχίονας θαυμαστοὺς ὥσπερ βεργία στημένα.
He was tall as a cypress, thin around the waist.

but his upper body and lower body were wide as a lion,
[…]
He wore a crown of precious stones and pearls
Which he never took off his head.
His chest was white as cold marble;
He had wondrous arms like planted stakes.42
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 103.

41
Byz.Ach 112–113, 116–119.

42
Achilles is described as part plant, part predator, and part inanimate object
(marble). These conventions are further emphasized when he rides incog-
nito into battle: “εἰς ἕναν του πιλάλημα καὶ εἰς μίαν του κονταρέαν | οὕτως
τοὺς ἐσυνέτριβεν ὡς φάλκων τὰ περδίκια” (With one charge and one strike
of the lance | He crushed them as a falcon crushes a partridge).43 This is
the first instance in this work of the trope of the heroic protagonist as a
bird of prey, the falcon, and the subjects of his violence described as his
prey, the partridge. This characterization of Achilles carries on into real
combat as well; when his lands are under siege by an enemy king, Achilles
leads an army to relieve a castle, where he engages in battle:
ἠπαίρνει τὸ κοντάριν του καὶ τὸ λαμπρὸν σκουτάριν

καὶ τόπον ἔδραμεν πολὺν καθάπερ τὸ γεράκιν.
τοῦτον δὲ πάντες ἔφριξαν ὅσοι καὶ ἂν τὸν εἶδαν.
He took his javelin and his shining sword

And charged into the plain like a hawk
Everyone was terrified when they saw him.44
Achilles is the bird of prey, the supreme predator. This is further reinforced
some time later, when Achilles tells Pandrouklos to unfurl his banner: “Τὸ
δὲ σημάδιν σταυραετὸς ὀλόχρυσος ὑπάρχει | καὶ λέων τὸ στόμα κόκκινος
εἰς κίτρινον ἀέραν” (The crest was a golden eagle | And the red mouth of
a lion on a yellow field).45 The flag is metonymous with Achilles; like him,
it depicts a chimeric predator: part eagle, part lion, and, like the tetraktys,
composed of woven fabric. And, as in the Digenis, Achilles’ military prow-
ess and superiority is proven through the use of figurative language: as he
charges into battle, “ὡς δράκων τὸ βλέμμαν φοβερὸς” (his ferocious
appearance was like a dragon);46 as he chases his enemies, “ἔτρεχεν ὥσπερ
λέων” (he ran as a lion);47 and when his enemies think they have eluded
him, they find him “πετόμενος” (flying) ahead of them.48 The hero of the
romance metaphorically transforms into a powerful hunter with the most
fearsome attributes of each of the predators.
43
Byz.Ach 151–152.
44
Byz.Ach 506–508.
45
Byz.Ach 533–534.
46
Byz.Ach 593.
47
Byz.Ach 602.
48
Byz.Ach 627.
206 A.J. GOLDWYN
This posthuman hero engages with the world in decidedly autopoietic

ways; it is a world defined by individual action, by competition, and by
violence, a world in which antagonism and domination are the primary
modes of interaction among humans and between humans and the natural
world. Thus, for instance, the narrator equates Achilles’ glory, heroism,
and masculinity with his ability to dominate and kill other people; in
describing a particularly bloody battle, he writes:
καὶ ὁ Ἀχιλλεὺς ἐνέτρεχεν μόνος, μεμονωμένος.

Ἐκεῖνοι ὑπερεθαύμαζαν τὴν ὀλιγότητάν τους
καὶ ὡσαν εἰς τοὺς ὀλιγοστοὺς μὲ θράσος κατεβαίνουν.
Ἐσμίξασιν ἀλάγια τρία τοῦ βασιλέως
καὶ εἰς ἕναν ἐκατέβηκαν ἀλάγιν τοῦ Ἀχιλλέως.
καλὰ τοὺς ὑπαντήσασιν, οὐκ ἠδειλίασάν τους,
ἀλλὰ ὁ εἷς τοὺς δέκα ἐσύνθλασεν, καὶ ἐκατεσφάξασίν τους,
καὶ ὡς γῦπες τοὺς ἐσυνθλάσαν, οἱ τριάκοντα τοὺς τριακόσιους.
Νὰ εἶδες †τὸν Ἀχιλλέα†, σπαθέας δοκιμασμένας,
οὐδέναν ἐδευτέρωνεν νὰ μὴ τὸν ρίψη κάτω.
Εἴκοσι μόνον ἔγλυσαν ἀπὸ τοὺς τριακόσιους
καὶ ἀπ’ αὐτοὺς τοὺς εἴκοσι ἔλαβαν ἄνδρας πέντε.
And Achilles ran on alone by himself.

The others were beyond amazed at how few they were
And with what courage these few charged.
They engaged three of the king’s cavalry units
And Achilles’ cavalry unit charged against one.
They withstood them well, they did not cower,
But crushed ten of them, and killed them,
And as vultures the thirty crushed three hundred.
You should see Achilles, wielding his sword,
He never needed a second stroke to cut someone down.
Only twenty of the three hundred escaped,
And from these twenty they captured five men.49
Though Achilles brings with him an army, the focus is on Achilles’ auto-
poietic engagement with the world around him: it is principally through
his own individual action—the author stresses twice that he did this by
himself—that the enemy army is repelled, that the lands lost are restored
to his father, and that his political and military power is consolidated over
Byz.Ach 546–557.
49
the newly subject people, who vow that “καὶ δοῦλοι σου νὰ εἴμεθεν ἡμεῖς
καὶ τὰ παιδία μας” (we will become your slaves, we and our children).50
Achilles, like Digenis, is alone, a figure who transgresses the border
between hero and monster, a figure outside the conventions of normal
behavior, normal dress, normal fears of death and combat, normal
restraints on both male and female sexuality. In this autopoietic world,
even Achilles’ sexual union with his beloved does not result in the creation
of a new unified creature as in the example of the tetraktys; rather, it
instantiates a new round of competitive violence among men seeking to
control female sexual agency.51 Thus when the brothers of Achilles’
beloved try to attack Achilles for sleeping with their sister, Achilles once
again transforms from the human lover into the chimeric predator; where
they are described “ὡς σφῆκες” (as wasps),52 “ὡς δράκων κρότον ἔποικεν,
ὡς λέων ἐβρυχίστην” (he shrieked like a dragon, like a roaring lion),53 and
then again some lines later, “ἐγύριζεν ὡς ἀετός, ἐσπάραζεν ὡς πάρδος”
(circled like an eagle, tore them apart like a leopard)54 and “ὡς φαλκόνιν
ἔστρεφεν καὶ ἐκατεφόνευέν τους” (as a falcon he turned and killed them).55
Other predators may come to fight him, but Achilles is the most powerful,
and the zoomorphic metaphors reinforce this status hierarchy. He takes
the sister from her brothers because he is more powerful than they are: he
is a more powerful man, hero, animal, and predator. Indeed, the warriors,
who started out as wasps, are now, in the final metaphor of the battle,
turned into something significantly less potent:
ὡσὰν ὁ μύρμηξ <ἢ> κώνωπας δύναται πρὸς τὸν λέων,

ἔτσι ἐδύνατο καὶ ὁ εὔτολμος ἐκεῖνος ὁ στρατιώτης
πρὸς Ἀχιλλέα τὸν φοβερόν, τὸν δράκοντα τὸν μέγαν.
What an ant or a gnat is capable of against a lion

Just as much was that daring soldier able to do
Byz.Ach 562.
50
For the expression of male competition through the traffic and control of women in the
51
War of Troy and in the romance tradition more generally, see Constantinou, “Between (Wo)
men.”
52
Byz.Ach 1384.
53
Byz.Ach 1390.
54
Byz.Ach 1398.
55
Byz.Ach 1401.
208 A.J. GOLDWYN
Against Achilles the fearsome, that great dragon.56
A similar comparison is made later in the text when an unnamed but pow-
erful French knight arrives to fight Achilles. His wife is scared, but he
consoles her, telling her to take solace in his power, since “δράκοντα
<φοβερὸν> κρατεῖς καὶ λεών περιλαμβάνεις | καὶ σμικροτάτην ἀλεποῦν
εἶδες καὶ ἐφοβήθης” (I am a fearsome and powerful dragon and a conquer-
ing lion | And you see and fear tiny foxes).57 Once again the hero’s domi-
nance over others is expressed through the power dynamic among animals.
As the brothers were gnats and mosquitoes, which cannot hurt a lion or a
dragon, so too is the French knight like a fox, the lion’s and dragon’s prey.
As well as being legible from literary, historical, and aesthetic positions,
Digenis’ and Achilles’ treatment of animals—both animals as such and
zoomorphic humans—and the authors’ ideological relation to that treat-
ment are legible from a position of posthuman ethics as well. For Cary
Wolfe, “the question of the animal is embedded within the larger context
of posthumanist theory generally” as posthumanism is concerned with
“the ethical and theoretical problems of nonhuman subjectivities.”58 Wolfe
suggests that “as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all
right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because
of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be avail-
able for use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance
violence against the social other of whatever species—or gender, or race,
or class, or sexual difference.”59 That is to say, oppression is predicated on
notions of similarity and dissimilarity, what Haraway calls “kinship.”60 In
this regard, the zoomorphic metaphors contain within them an ideologi-
cal justification for patriarchal—in this case including humanist—oppres-
sion: just as with literal animals, humans zoomorphically characterized as
56
Byz.Ach 1411–1413.
57
Byz.Ach 1572–1573.
58
Wolfe, Animal Rites, 6. As with ecocriticism, Wolfe similarly connects posthumanism
with previous forms of activist identity studies and post-structuralism: “what does it mean
when the aspiration of human freedom, extended to all, regardless of race or class or gender,
has as its material condition of possibility absolute control over the lives of nonhuman others?
If our work is characterized in no small part by its duty to be socially responsive to the ‘new
social movements’ (civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and so on), then how must
our work itself change when the other to which it tries to do justice is no longer human?”
(7).
59
Wolfe, Animal Rites, 8.
60
As, for instance, in the subtitle of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
prey are somehow less than fully human, and are thus outside the kinship
bonds that regulate and constrain their killing. Wolfe suggests that a
humanist ethics “insisted that subjectivity—and with it freedom—no lon-
ger depended on any single identifiable attribute, such as membership in a
certain race, gender, or class” and thus applies to all humans, and “from
there it was but one short step for animal rights philosophy to insist that
species too should be set aside, that membership in a given species should
have no bearing on freedom and rights.”61 A posthumanist ethics, there-
fore, extends beyond the human to include beings non-human, inorganic,
or of indeterminate consciousness.
As with the acceptance of the Anthropocene (or the Chthulucene or
the Capitolocene or the Plantationocene)62 as the guiding term for the
current ecological moment, to accept the ontological conditions of post-
humanism as laid out by Wolfe and other advocates, then, is an implicit
acceptance of a new set of ethical paradigms for relating to the world.
Consciousness, ethics, and ontology are no longer conceived of as auto-
poietic, that is, formulated through the freedom of the autonomous indi-
vidual, but as sympoietic, that is, rooted in dynamic systems that support
all the constituent elements of the network, including the human and
non-human, the organic and inorganic. Since self-identity is formed
through relations with others, the subject status of the others must be of
equal importance to the subject status of the self. Posthumanism, then,
“isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has
been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes
the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism
itself.”63
Despite their focus on the autopoietic hero who transcends the social
and physical limits of humanity, the medieval romances also contain a
counter-narrative, offering glimpses of an alternate model of human
engagements with the world guided by alternate principles, ethics, and
materiality. Like Digenis, Achilles falls in love with a girl who is locked
away from the male gaze behind seemingly impenetrable high walls.
Unlike Digenis, however, in which the space in which the beloved lives
61
Wolfe, Animal Rites, 8.
62
For the distinction among various possible names, see Haraway, Staying with the Trouble,
99, in which she argues that “the issues about naming […] have to do with scale, rate/speed,
synchronicity, and complexity.”
63
Wolfe, What is Posthumanism, xv.
210 A.J. GOLDWYN
remains unnarrated, the space in which the girl lives in the Tale of Achilles
is narrated in great detail, and the vision offered presents a sharply different
model of human engagement with the world than the autopoietic model
exemplified by Digenis and Achilles. Unlike the world beyond her enclo-
sure, a space of total war in which the most powerful and violent are unfet-
tered by the rules that apply to others, the enclosed garden space in which
the girl resides is sympoietic. It is a place without strife, without competi-
tion or violence, a space in which the individual is not autonomous but is
rather nestled peacefully among a network of other beings and, impor-
tantly from the posthumanist perspective, a space in which the boundaries
between human, plant, non-human animal, and inanimate object trans-
gress and interpenetrate one another, thus rendering such speciated and
material distinctions ultimately meaningless. It is, to speak anachronisti-
cally, a kind of medieval romance wildlife and nature sanctuary or biore-
serve, a place where animals and plants can flourish protected from the
ravages of the autopoietic world beyond; indeed, the narrator of the
Achilleid describes the iron door and high mosaic-covered wall that sepa-
rates the enclosure from the outside world.64
Inside, “βρύσις ἦτον ἐρωτική, τὸν κῆπον κατεβαίνει” (a lovely spring
flowed through the garden).65 The spring is at first described as a thing of
great natural beauty, as it “τὰ δένδρη δὲ καὶ τὰ φυτὰ ἔρραινε” (flowed
around trees and plants);66 but the landscape is not entirely natural, as the
depths of the spring are lined with “λιθάριν” (gems),67 suggesting some
human intervention in the creation of the landscape, a theme further elab-
orated in the description of the animals and plants that inhabit the garden.
The “γύροθεν ταύτης ἵσταντο καὶ λέοντες καὶ πάρδοι” (lions and leopards
standing around)68 are, in fact, not the fierce predators of the autopoietic
world, in which humans must kill or be killed; rather they are “ὅλα λιθάρια
πάντερπνα εἰς βάθος ἐξυσμένα” (entirely made of delightful stones pour-
ing forth from the depths).69 The sympoietic world is a world of highly
artificial nature, in which human, non-human animal, and inorganic mat-
ter are combined in a state of peace and harmony—as, indeed, are all
Byzantine gardens, real or literary.
64
Byz.Ach 765–766.
65
Byz.Ach 776.
66
Byz.Ach 778.
67
Byz.Ach 780.
68
Byz.Ach 781.
69
Byz.Ach 782.
After the description of the spring, the narrator describes a golden

plane tree70 in the garden’s center:
ἡ μήτηρ δὲ τῆς εὐγενοῦς ἐκείνης τῆς κουρτέσας

χρυσὴν ἐποῖκεν πλάτανον, μέσον τοῦ κήπου σταίνει,
καὶ γένος ἅπαν τῶν πουλίων χρυσᾶ κατασκευάζειν.
ἐντέχνως ὅλα ἐκάθουντα ἐκεῖνα εἰς τὴν πλατάνην,
ἐπνέασιν οἱ ἄνεμοι καὶ ἐκεῖνα ἐκιλαδοῦσαν,
ἕναν καθέναν τὸ αὐτὸ τὸ μέλος τὸ οἰκεῖον.
[…]
τὸ γὰρ σκευάσαι ἀπὸ χρυσὸν ἢ ἐξ ἑτέρας ὕλης
πουλίων γένος, ἑρπετῶν ἢ καὶ τῶν τετραπόδων,
εἶδον πολλὰ ὅτι ἐνέτυχον καὶ παλαιὰ καὶ νέα.
τὸ δ’ ἄδειν τε τοῦ κιλαδεῖν χρυσὰ μυρία μέλη
χρυσῶν ὀρνέων καὶ πουλίων, πτηνῶν καὶ τῶν ἑτέρων,
ἐκτὸς σαρκὸς καὶ αἵματος, πνοῆς πτερῶν τε δίχου {ξένων},
τῆς φύσεως ἔστιν θαυμαστόν, πολλὰ ἐξαιρημένον.
The mother of this high-born damsel

made a golden plane-tree and planted it in the middle of the garden;
and all types of golden birds she placed there.
They were skillfully placed in the plane tree
the wind blew and they chirped
each one singing its own familiar melody.
[…]
For some were made from gold and others from wood,
these birds. And there were reptiles and mammals.
I saw many that were crafted there both old and new.
The singsong chirping of thousands of golden songs
Golden birds and fowl and other winged creatures.
They were not of flesh and blood, they didn’t have breath or wings,
{strange}
Their nature was wondrous, outstanding.71
70
For a survey of golden plane trees in antiquity and in Byzantium, see Iafrate, Wandering
Throne, 78–84.
71
Byz.Ach 793–797, 802–808. Brett, “The Automata in the Byzantine ‘Throne of
Solomon’” remains an important exploration of these devices as both a literary topos and as
material objects. Truitt, Medieval Robots, 24–26, discusses the throne and its reception in the
Latin West. These studies, however, have been almost entirely superceded by Allegra Iafrate’s
Wandering Throne of Solomon (2016), which puts the throne in a much broader historical
and geographical framework, analyzing its significance in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish cul-
212 A.J. GOLDWYN
More than the plane tree itself, which seems to be a representation in gold
of a living tree, the birds and animals carved there seem almost lifelike,
chirping as if they were actually alive. Unlike Achilles and his male relatives
and the girl’s male relatives, who are concerned exclusively with warfare
and killing, it is the girl’s mother who is responsible for the creation of the
golden plane tree; indeed, this might be the only woman-crafted (or at
least woman-commissioned) object in the entire corpus of the
romances.72
When the narrator subsequently describes the thermal bath in which
the girl bathes, the complicated amalgamation of human, non-human ani-
mal, and inorganic material becomes even more pronounced:
Πορφυροχρυσιομάρμαρον ἐποίησεν τὴν τρούλαν

μετὰ σαφείρων καὶ σαρδίου καὶ σμάραγδων ὡραίων.
[…]
καὶ τὸ νερὸν ροδόσταμμαν, καὶ ἐλούετον ἡ κόρη.
πολλάκις ἂν ἐραθύμιζεν ἔπεφτεν εἰς τὰ ἄνθη.
Ἐκεῖ ὅπου ἔτρεχεν τὸ θερμὸν τὸ θαυμαστὸν ἐκεῖνο
ζῶον ὑπῆρχεν θαυμαστόν, ἀνθρωπόμορφον, ὡραῖον,
ἄν τὸ εἶδες νὰ ’πες ἐκ παντὸς ζῶντας ἀνθρώπου στόμαν,
The basin was made of purple and gold marble

with sapphires and sardonyx and lovely emeralds
[…]
And the girl bathed in rosewater.
Many times she lolled lazily among the flowers.
In that wondrous place where the thermal bath ran,
there were wondrous creatures, human-like, beautiful,
which you would swear spoke from living human mouths.73
tures and also reflecting on the different ways in which various medieval cultures perceived
this marvel. For the material objects, see also Niewöhner, “Zoomorphic Rainwater Spouts.”
For the erotic aspects of the fountains in particular in the romances, see Nilsson, “Ancient
Water in Fictional Fountains.”
72
Such trees were not unknown in Byzantium; at the Great Palace, for instance, there was
a “golden tree with its mechanically singing birds, which was created for the emperor
Theophilos by the master of the mint in the second quarter of the ninth century” (Dauterman
Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, 42).
73
Byz.Ach 837–838, 842–846.
The bath represents the same kind of human intervention in the environ-
ment as the spring with which the description of the garden opens: it is a
highly ornamental, man-made object set in a carefully crafted natural envi-
ronment. The animals that surround the girl, moreover, are anthropomor-
phic, with human voices, yet they are machines and, more than that,
machines shaped like non-human animals.
The girl herself is a fully integrated part of this world; the garden, after
all, was built for her, organized around her, and intended for her to be at
its center. And like Digenis and Achilles, the descriptions of whom as wild
animals and ferocious predators match their means of engaging with the
world, the description of the girl depicts her in terms similar to her sur-
roundings. Like them, she is part human, part animal, part plant, part
inorganic material:
Φορεῖ στεφάνιν καστρωτὸν καὶ βέργας μουσειωμένας,

καὶ τραχηλέα ὁλόχρυσην καὶ χυμευτὰ βραχιόλια
καὶ ἀγκωνάρια ἐξαίρετα διὰ λίθων καὶ μαργάρων.
ἄλλοτε πάλιν ἔπλεκαν οἱ Ἔρωτες τὰ ἄνθη
καὶ ἐποιοῦσαν στέφανον καὶ ἐφόραιναν τὴν κόρην.
[…]
μαργαροχιονόδοντας, γλυκοστοματοβρύσις,
ἀσπροκοκκινομάγουλη, γέννημα τῶν Χαρίτων,
κρυσταλλοκιονοτράχηλος, ὑπερανασταλμένη.
She wore a crenellated garland and an inlaid wreath,

And a necklace all of gold and an alloyed bracelet
And outstanding elbow cuffs of gems and pearls.
The Passions wove flowers
And made garlands for the girl to wear.
[…]
Pearl white teeth, sweet breath,
Pale and rosy cheeks, born of the Graces,
A crystal columned neck, held high.74
The figurative language used to describe the girl exemplifies her posthu-
man hybridity: she is human, but decorated with plants in the form of
wreaths and garlands as well as with inanimate materials such as the neck-
lace and bracelet made from precious stones and metals. This materiality
Byz.Ach 865–869, 874–876.
74
214 A.J. GOLDWYN
extends beyond just her decorative outerwear to include the materiality of

her body: crystal and pearl mix with rosy flesh.
Perhaps most striking is the way this hybridity is manifested in the dic-
tion of the text itself. As if to emphasize the inseparability and entangle-
ment of these organic and inorganic elements, the words used to describe
the girl are themselves portmanteaus that visually manifest the entangle-
ments they represent: “μαργαροχιονόδοντας” (a combination of pearl,
snow, and teeth), γλυκοστοματοβρύσις (a combination of sweetness,
mouth, and fountain) and “κρυσταλλοκιονοτράχηλος” (a combination of
crystal, column, and neck), for instance, contain both organic and inor-
ganic, human and inhuman elements. In this, she does not fundamentally
differ from the brook, the golden plane tree, or the metal birds who sing
with human voices: within the garden, natural elements are fashioned by
human artifice: plants, stones, metals, and gems mix with flesh and bone.75
Thus the picture of the autopoietic world and the sympoietic world
appear very differently; one is a world of exploitation and violence, the
other of homeostasis and tranquility. In the world of the romance, how-
ever, this sympoietic world is ephemeral, inevitably supplanted by the vio-
lent world that lies just beyond its city walls, a world that will expose
women to the patriarchal violence from which the enclosure protects
them. Achilles, then, is described almost like a poacher when he seeks to
steal the girl from her enclosure:
Ἐκεῖνος δὲ ἐτριγύριζεν ἀπόξωθεν τοῦ τείχου

καὶ ἐκ τὸ φαρίν του ἐπέζευσεν καὶ πιάνει τὸ κοντάριν.
ὡς λέων ἐπροπήδησεν καὶ ἐτίναξεν ὡς δράκων
καὶ τὸ κοντάριν του ἔμπηξεν καὶ ἐπήδησεν ἀπέσω,
ἄρματα ἐφόριεν ὀχυρά, κτύπον ἐποῖκεν μέγαν.
ἡ κόρη δὲ οὐκ ἐγνώρισεν ὅτι ἐμπῆκεν ἀπέσω,
καὶ εἰς τοῦ πλατάνου τὸν κορμὸν βλέπει τὸν ἀγουρίτση
καὶ εὐθὺς ἐλιγοθύμησεν, ἔπεσεν πρὸς τὰ ἄνθη.
Δραμὼν δὲ ἐκεῖνος παρευθὺς κρατεῖ την ἐκ τὸ χέριν.
He thrice-circling the walls
75
Such descriptions are not unique to the Byzantine romances; the origins of rhetorical
strategies that compare women to nature, gardens, and animals has a long genealogy that
includes, in addition to the ancient Greek novels that are the more direct source of their
Byzantine descendants, texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which begins with Daphne’s
transformation from girl to plant.
Leapt down from his steed and drew his lance

He leapt up as a lion and shook as a dragon
And planted his lance and leapt over the wall
He wore heavy armor and made a great noise
The girl did not know that he had gotten over
And from the trunk of the plane tree sees the boy
And immediately her heart skips a beat and she fell into the flowers.
Running to her, he picked her up right away.76
The autopoietic predator—the lion and the dragon—breaks the barrier of

the sympoietic garden, and takes the girl away from her paradise. Indeed,
she becomes like the plucked flower: she has fallen into the flower bed,
and he picks her up and carries her away. Removed from this environment,
however, she, like Digenis’ wife, cannot survive: she, too, dies young, and
the infertility of their union reflects, from an autopoietic perspective, the
unique and irreproducible nature of the hero and, from the sympoietic
perspective, the girl’s inability to survive outside her habitat and the gen-
eral sterility and infertility of the environment to which she is removed.
Achilles’ transgressing of the garden walls, therefore, also signals the
destruction of the last spaces free of autopoietic worlding.77
The Tale of Achilles, then, models two different forms of environmental
engagement. The first is an autopoietic model embodied by an autono-
mous individual who constructs his identity through violence and domi-
nation over those who fall outside his concept of human subjectivity,
primarily women, animals, and enemy soldiers. He is forged in order to
survive in the world in which he exists: one defined by this very violence.
At the risk of establishing a too rigidly essentialist model of the relation-
ship between gender and nature, it is nevertheless the case—at least in the
Byzantine romances—that men represent this autopoietic notion and
women the sympoietic. Thus, in contrast with Achilles, the girl embodies
an alternate, sympoietic, model of engaging with nature. Deeply embed-
ded in the environment in which she lives, she exists in a state of peace and
sustainability.
76
Byz.Ach 1148–1156.
77
Indeed, Haraway follows Anna Tsing (in “Feral Biologies”) in noting that “the Holocene
was the long period when refugia, places of refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain
reworlding in rich cultural and biological diversity. Perhaps the outrage meriting a name like
Anthropocene is about the destruction of places and times of refuge for people and other
critters” (Staying with the Trouble, 100).
216 A.J. GOLDWYN
The contrast between them can be seen most clearly in a scene shortly
after their marriage. Achilles goes on a hunting expedition—the first in the
romance—and even takes the same in-laws against whom he had earlier
made war. While hunting,
καὶ λέων ἐξέβην φοβερὸς ἐκ τοῦ καλαμοῶνος,

καὶ ὁ Ἀχιλλεὺς ἐφώναζεν εὐθὺς τοὺς ἐδικούς του
μὴ νὰ κατέβουν εἰς αὐτόν, μὴ νὰ τὸν πολεμήσουν.
ἀλλὰ κανεὶς οὐκ ἐτόλμησεν ἵνα τὸν ἀπαντήσῃ,
ἅπαντες ἐδειλίασαν τοῦ λέοντος τὴν μάχην.
Πεζεύγει εὐθὺς ὁ Ἀχιλλεὺς κρατῶν τὸ ἀπελατίκιν,
ἀλλὰ ἐκατέβην ἀπάνω του ὡς φοβερὸς τὸ ἦθος
καὶ ἐτίναξεν τὸ χέριν του, κρούει τον εἰς τὸ κεφάλιν.
εὐθὺς τὴν ράβδον ἔρριψεν, πιάνει τον ἐκ τὸ στόμαν,
καὶ μὲ τὰ χέρια του ἔσχισεν τὸν λέων μέσα δύο.
a fearsome lion came out of the reeds

And Achilles immediately called to his men
Not to charge at it, not to battle with it.
No one dared to engage it
Everyone cowered in the face of a battle with a lion
Achilles immediately dismounted holding his mace
And charged down in his fearsome way
And clenching his fist, strikes him on the head
Immediately he strikes with his rod, he goes for the mouth
And with his hands tears the lion in two.78
He defeats the lion in the same manner as does Digenis. By defeating the
lion barehanded, Achilles proves himself to be at the height of his power
as a warrior, a king, and a lover. Achilles builds these aspects of his identity
through competition and killing, autopoietic activities.
When he returns home, however, the girl sings a song. Like Achilles’
hunt, the girl’s song reflects their political and amatory success. She, how-
ever, consistent with her characterization, renders their happiness not in
terms of hunting but, rather, of horticulture:
Ἄν σχίσουν τὴν καρδίτσα μου, ἔσωθεν νὰ σὲ εὕρουν,
78
Byz.Ach 1604–1613. Like Digenis, after his hunt Achilles is careful to wash his blood-
stained clothes and change into nicer, golden ones upon returning to civilization (Byz.
Ach 1620ff.).
νὰ σὲ εὕρουν ριζοφύτευτον, στρατιῶτα μου ἀνδρειωμένε,

φυτὸν εἰς τῆν καρδίτσα μου, αὐθέντη εὐγενικέ μου.
ἐξήπλωσαν οἱ κλάδοι σου εἰς ὅλα μου τὰ μέλη
καὶ αἱ ρίζαι σου ἐκράτησαν πᾶσαν μου ἁρμονία,
καὶ ἡ ψύχη καὶ τὸ κορμὶν ἔναι τοῦ ὁρισμοῦ σου.
If my heart splinters, it is found in you,

They find it rooted in you, my brave soldier
Planted in my heart, my high-born lord,
Your branches overgrow my limbs
And your roots overpower my serenity
And my soul and my trunk are at your command.79
Consistent with her characterization throughout the romance, the girl

evokes the grafted tree metaphor—an instance of sympoiesis—to describe
her relationship with Achilles. Part of her, the splinter of her heart, is
rooted in him, and it grows there; he becomes a canopy, much as the plane
tree was before she was married, and his roots and her trunk seem to grow
together in her telling. Where he sees the world in terms of how to kill and
destroy, she sees the world in terms of how to graft, to network, to join
together. Their behaviors manifest the same difference between the carrier
bag and the spear that Ursula Le Guin identified in science fiction
literature.
Posthuman Gardens in the Komnenian Novels

Though the Tale of Achilles is among the latest of the romances, the con-
trast between these two models of natural engagement are not an innova-
tion of this late text. Its principal source, Digenis Akritis, also distinguishes
between autopoietic models—Digenis hunting and warring in the border-
lands—and sympoietic—Digenis building and maintaining the garden in
which his wife resides. This distinction is perhaps even more clearly detailed
in the Komnenian novels, which frequently emphasize the tranquility of a
garden violently encroached upon by those who adhere to a more exploit-
ative model of social and environmental engagement.
In Hysmine and Hysminias, for instance, Hysminias admires the various
rows of trees he sees in the garden, noting that “δάφνη γὰρ καὶ μυρρίνη καὶ
Byz.Ach 1628–1633.
79
218 A.J. GOLDWYN
κυπάρριτος καὶ ἄμπελοι καὶ τἆλλα τῶν φυτῶν, ὅσα τὸν κῆπον ἐκόσμει […]
ἐφαπλοῦσι τοὺς κλάδους ὡς χεῖρας καὶ ὥσπερ χορὸν συστησάμενα
κατοροφοῦσι τὸν κῆπον” (laurel and myrtle and cypresses and vines and all
the other plants that adorn a garden […] had their branches raised like
arms and, as if setting up a dance, they spread a roof over the garden).80
The trees are here anthropomorphized as dancers, an example of the
boundary confusion that characterizes the gardens and the people who
inhabit them. Later, the narrator describes a basin with a golden eagle
sculpture perched on top, around which
Ἀρτιτόκος αἲξ τοὺς ἐμπροσθίους ὁκλάσασα τῶν ποδῶν πίνει τοῦ ὕδατος.
αἰπόλος τῇ θηλῇ παρακάθηται, ψαύει τῶν οὐθάτων. καὶ ἡ μὲν πίνει τοῦ
ὕδατος, ὁ δ’ ἀμέλγει γάλα λευκόν. καὶ ὅσον αὕτη προσκέχηνε τῷ ποτῷ, ὁ
αἰπόλος οὐκ ἀνανεύει τῆς ἀμολγῆς.
A goat that had just given birth crouches over its fore feet to drink the water;
the goatherd sits by the teat, feeling the udder. The goat drinks the water,
the goatherd squeezes out the white milk; and as long as the goat gulped
down the water, the goatherd squeezes out the white milk; and as long as
the goat gulped down the water, the goatherd does not abandon his
milking.81
The status of these beings is indeterminate and ambiguous; from the con-
text, it seems as though they are sculptural ornamentation around the
basin, and yet they are never explicitly referred to as sculptures. Indeed,
the only clue that they are comes at the end of the description when “Καὶ
λαγῷνος τῷ κύκλῳ συνεφιζάνει, καὶ τῷ δεχιῷ τῶν ἐμπροσθίων ποδῶν
ἀνορύττων ὥσπερ τὸ στόμα πηγὴν ὕδατος ἐκεῖθεν ἀναστομοῖ καὶ ὅλην
καταβρέχει τὴν γένυν” (a hare joins in the circle and, dipping his right
forepaw in, he makes a stream of water spurt up into his mouth and wets
all his face).82 The narrator’s indications that these are permanent features
of the garden are belied by his use of phrases indicating movement and
action.
Subsequently, the narrator describes various birds cast in bronze and
from whose beaks water poured “ὅ μετὰ ψόφου ῥέον φωνὴν τοῖς ὄρνισιν
80
H&H 1.4.3.
81
H&H 1.5.3.
82
H&H 1.5.5.
ἐχαρίζετο” (with a flowing sound which endowed the birds with song).83
Immediately following this, the narrator describes how “ἐψιθύριζε καὶ τὰ
πέταλα τῶν δένδρων τῷ ζεφύρῳ συνανακρουόμενα εἶπες ἂν ἀκούσας ἡδὺ
μελίζεσθαι τὰ πτηνά” (the leaves of the trees, stirred by the zephyr, whis-
pered; hearing this you would have said that the birds were singing
sweetly).84 Thus the passage gives to both water flowing through metal
and wind flowing through trees sounds indistinguishable from those made
by living birds. The garden is a site of sympoiesis: the master of the house
and Hysmine’s father, Sosthenes, is also in a sense the chief gardener: he
cultivates the plants and trees, which in turn provide him with wine, shade,
fruits, and pleasure. And as the living trees seem to dance like humans, the
garden’s sculptures also seem to come alive. The subject matter of the
sculptures, moreover, suggests the interdependence of humans and non-
human animals, as the goat that has just given birth is protected by the
goatherd while the goat, in turn, gives the goatherd sustenance. This gar-
den, then, demarcates a world in which all aspects of the natural world
function symbiotically, from the trees to the humans to the animals—even
the inanimate ones—as well as the inorganic material of which the garden
is constructed, water and stone. In the garden, the characters are more or
less safe; it is only Hysminias who nearly violates the sympoietic norms of
the garden in his attempts to rape Hysmine. Hysminias’ transgressions,
however, pale in comparison to those he and Hysmine encounter outside
the garden, a world of violence, slavery, and rape. Though it is manifested
in different terms than the gardens and wild spaces in Digenis Akritis and
the Tale of Achilles, the fundamental principles are the same: in the garden,
the constituent parts of the material world engage in mutually enriching
and sustaining activities; in the wilds, they engage in competitive domi-
nance and exploitation.
These contrasts are even more marked in Drosilla and Charikles. The
opening of the piece describes a meadow in bloom, with lilies and other
anthropomorphized plants and flowers, for example:
αἱ κάλυκες δὲ τῶν ῥόδων κελεισμέναι

ἢ μᾶλλον εἰπεῖν μικρὸν ἀνεῳγμέναι
ταύτην ἐθαλάμευον ὥσπερ παρθένον.
83
H&H 1.5.6.
84
H&H 1.5.6.
220 A.J. GOLDWYN
the buds of roses, which were slightly closed,

or, more accurately, just slightly opened,
kept the flowers in seclusion like a maiden.85
Statues of people set in a circle mimic the circle-dance of the living girls off
to the side, and the centerpiece of the garden is a column with a bronze
eagle perched on top. Drosilla mirrors the meadow: part flower, part
human, part inorganic material (her hands are white as sardonyx, her teeth
are like pearls, and her eyebrows like the bow of Eros).86 The narrator
returns again and again to the perfection of a natural environment supple-
mented by artificial adornment: it is “λειμὼν […] ἥδιστος” (a most
delightful meadow) containing a variety of “ὡραῖαι” (beautiful) trees,
“δένδρα τερπνὰ καὶ καρποφόρα” (delightful fruit trees), and “πόα τερπνὴ
ῥόδων” (delightful rose bushes).87 Again, the garden, its delicate balance
of natural and artificial, human and non-human, organic and inorganic,
represents a model of sympoietic worlding, since, for Haraway, “Species
interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that
game must be one of response and respect.”88
Whereas Hysmine and Hysminias opt to leave the garden in which they
reside and try their luck in the harsh world beyond, Drosilla and Charikles
are violently torn from theirs, taken into slavery as all around them men,
women, and children are murdered and enslaved, while the garden itself is
destroyed, a viscerally traumatic representation of the terrible human and
ecological consequences of autopoietic and patriarchal ideologies for peo-
ple and environments engaged in non-exploitative models of existence.
Thus, even as the gardens offer sympoietic models of mutually natural
engagement that promote the flourishing and interspeciation of various
kinds of beings in peace, the narratives refuse to allow these models to
persist. Underlying them seems to be a need to see these places destroyed;
indeed, in the case of the Tale of Achilles, the audience is expected to revel
in and actively hope for the girl’s removal from such an environment.
Thus, a certain kind of environmental pessimism is encoded within these
texts: not only are these gardens not sustainable because of the ever pres-
ent threat of violence, it is not at all clear that they should survive, as they
85
D&C 1.83.
86
D&C 1.123, 143–146. For Drosilla as hybrid, see 109 in this volume.
87
D&C 1.77, 78, 80, 81.
88
Haraway, When Species Meet, 19.
deprive men of the things that give their life meaning: opportunities for
sex, hunting, and conquest.
The happy resolutions of these narratives for the lovers, then, are at best
ambivalent. Though the lovers end up reunited, married, physically safe,
and restored to positions of social prestige and economic power, the focal-
ization of these narratives through the privileged positions of the protago-
nists obscures the fact that these gardens will never be the same again: that
tree, that animal, that baby, that woman, are all dead and will never be
again.
Posthumanism, (Odd)Kinning, and the Future

of Byzantine Studies
Though Haraway initiated the study of posthumanism with “A Cyborg

Manifesto” in 1985, her work since then has shifted away from this par-
ticular avatar. In her 2003 Companion Species Manifesto, she moves instead
towards a study of dogs, arguing that “the imperialist fantasies of techno-
humanism built into policy and research projects” are no longer a suffi-
cient locus for interpreting the contemporary moment: “By the end of the
millennium, cyborgs could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog
to gather up the threads needed for critical inquiry.”89 In place of Cold
War fears of nuclear annihilation, she sees the greatest threat in climate
change, and so shifts towards a study of dogs and companion species “to
help craft tools for science studies and feminist theory in the present time,
when secondary Bushes threaten to replace the old growth of more livable
naturecultures in the carbon budget politics of all water-based life on
earth.”90 In “go[ing] happily to the dogs” to explore possible solutions to
anthropogenic climate change, Haraway does not reject the cyborg; rather,
seeking to claim “dog writing [as] a branch of feminist theory,” she argues
that just as the boundary between the human and the cyborg—a bound-
ary between organic and inorganic materiality—forces a recognition of the
interpenetration of technology and culture into nature, so too do the
interspecies entanglements that form the relationships between humans
89
Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 4.
90
Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 5. And again shortly thereafter: “I risk alienating
my old doppelganger, the cyborg, in order to try to convince readers that dogs might be
better guides through the thickets of technobiopolitics in the Third Millennium of the
Current Era” (4).
222 A.J. GOLDWYN
and dogs exemplify the interpenetration of the human and the non-human
animal in a way that parallels the interpenetration of human and techno-
logical in the cyborg:
Cyborgs and companion species each bring together the human and non-
human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and
structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject,
diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and cul-
ture in unexpected ways. Besides, neither a cyborg nor a companion animal
pleases the pure of heart who long for better protected species boundaries
and sterilization of category deviants.91
The presence of Haraway’s cyborg as the interpenetration of organic and

inorganic elements within a single being extends beyond the human to
include plants and animals in gardens. The ancient and medieval worlds,
including Byzantium, were replete with a variety of different kinds of
organic–inorganic and natural–artificial hybrids, often grouped together
as “automata.”92 For Haraway, sustainability is not a commitment to a
return to the purely natural state of the world before the Anthropocene,
since, as the long history of automata demonstrates, organic and machine
hybrids have a long history.93 She is, as Cohen writes, “antitechnophobic”
in that she sees a sustainable future as one in which humans and their
robotic or cyborgic creations work sympoietically towards a sustainable
and rejuvenating world. Indeed, though Haraway is writing about posthu-
man futurity, the sustainable world she imagines in the future can yet be
found in the Byzantine past. The presence of the animal cyborg is not just
a literary or romance motif described for aesthetic pleasure; the existence
of automata was one part of the chain of intellectual development that led
to humans seeing themselves as machines as well, a still influential theory
91
Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 4.
92
For automata in Byzantium, see Dauterman Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, 42–45.
For a wonderfully illustrated diachronic and transnational history of such creations, see
Chapuis and Droz, Automata. For an introduction to automata in the Arabic sources, see
Zielinski and Weibel, Allah’s Automata.
93
For a brief history of automata from antiquity to the Middle Ages, see Truitt, Medieval
Robots, 2–7 and for some methodological comments on the difference between understand-
ing automata in fictional and non-fictional texts, see 6–7: “Imaginary or legendary automata
that appear in twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts reveal as much about medieval attitudes
to natural knowledge as the actual objects that were created to enliven courtly pageantry or
to adorn monumental clocks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries” (6).
of mechanistic philosophy developed with most devastating consequences

by René Descartes, who argued that animals were organic machines with
no soul.94 It was no small leap to imagine the same for humans: Julien
Offray de la Mettrie’s 1747 L’homme Machine, then, is the apotheosis of
mechanistic thinking that—though it is doubtful he ever read the Tale of
Achilles—nevertheless participates in the same ideological debate about
the ethical ramifications of the breaching of the organic–inorganic divide.95
94
A critique of Descartes was foundational to the animal rights movement; Peter Singer’s
deconstruction of Descartes’ philosophy on animals, which Singer calls “the absolute nadir”
and “the last, most bizarre, and—for the animals—most painful outcome of Christian doc-
trine” in Animal Liberation, was central to the philosophical revision of human conceptions
of animals (200).
95
Indeed, just as previous hybrid forms and animal automata expose the artificial divide
between human and non-human animal, between plant and animal, between organic and
inorganic matter; just as Digenis, both Christian and Muslim, both enforces and complicates
the separateness of these identities in the liminal space in which he resides; so too do other
technological interventions “problematize the boundary between the living and the dead,”
suggesting the necessity of technology for a sustainable posthuman futurity. As E.R. Truitt
demonstrates, androids and automata “are frequently found at gravesites, mausoleums, and
memorials in medieval literature. […] Memorial automata often look human, and they can
be eerily lifelike copies of individuals.” From this, she suggests that “automata, as lifelike
proxies for individuals, call identity into question. Is a perfect copy of someone the same as
the exemplar? Second, sepulchral automata interrogate what makes a living body.” Truitt’s
primary example of this is drawn from the Roman de Troie and its sources and analogues,
notably Guido delle Colonne and John Lydgate (the Greek War of Troy is omitted from this
discussion): after removing Hector’s internal organs, tubes are placed through his nose (in
Benoît and Lydgate) or the top of his head is cut off (Guido) so that an embalming liquid
can flow through his body. In his description, “Guido repeats the phrase ‘as though alive’
[quasi viuum] four times and the word ‘falsely’ [ficticie] twice in his description of this arti-
ficial marvel. Hector is lifelike in appearance, but he is not alive,” thus complicating the
dividing line between life and death. The Greek version, however, refuses to engage in such
existentialism; whereas “the preparation of Hector’s corpse, the construction of his tomb,
and his funeral unfold over three hundred and fifty-five lines” in the Roman de Troie, the
Greek passage comes in at ninety lines (WoT 7286–7376). The Greek translator, moreover,
does not seem to fully grasp the mechanics of the embalming machine:
Εἰς τὸ κιβούριον τὸ φρικτὸν ἐκεῖνο τὸ μεγάλον

τὸ θρονίν του εθέσασιν, ἐπάνω τὸν ἐκάτσαν.
Δύο βατσέλια εὐγενικά, τὰ λέγουσιν λεκάνες,
ἐβάλαν, ἐγεμίσασι βαλσαμόλαιον ἔσω
μετὰ σμύρνας εὐγενικῆς καὶ ἀλόης ὡσαύτος.
Ἐκεῖ τὰ ἐκαθίσασιν ἔσω τοῦ κιβουρίου.
τοὺς δύο πόδας ἔβαλαν ἔσω τῶν βατσελίων.
ἀπάνω ἐχωνόντησαν, λέγω, τῶν ἀστραγγάλων.
224 A.J. GOLDWYN
The Companion Species Manifesto, then, tells “a story of co-habitation, co-

evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality” that, in its combination
of dog, human, and cyborg, “might more fruitfully inform livable politics
and ontologies in current life worlds.”96 That is to say, a sustainable eco-
ethics requires an acknowledgment of the necessity of productive interac-
tion between the organic and inorganic and a change in consciousness that
would recognize the necessity of one species for the survival of another.
If Haraway is right, then the medieval Greek romance offers just such a
world: the sympoietic gardens in which humans, animals, and plants min-
gle in a carefully cultivated space of natural and human artifice. Indeed,
several years before the invention of posthumanism, Anthony Littlewood
had described the gardens in such terms: “The authors of the romances
are at pains to emphasize both the beauties of the gardens and the beauties
of the heroines,” thus suggesting the possibilities of an ecofeminist read-
ing in which “the beauty of the one augments the beauty of the other.”97
Δύω χρυσοὺς ἐβάλασι κεράμους ἐμνοστάτους.

ἀπὸ τὴν μύτην τὸν σκεποῦν ἕως τοὺς ἀστραγγάλους.
ούκ ἄφηναν τὴν μυρωδίαν ἔξω διὰ νὰ ὑπαγαίνῃ,
ἀλλ’ ἔσωθεν εἰς τὸ κορμὶν ἐχώνευεν ἀπέσω.
On that marvelous and great ciborium

they set his throne, and sat him on top.
Two elegant vatselia, by which they mean basins,
they made, filling the inside with balsam oil,
with fragrant myrrh and even aloe.
These they placed inside the ciborium.
They put his two feet in the basins;
they submerged him, I say, up to his ankles.
They made two fragrant golden ceramic tiles
that poured the substance down from his nose to his ankles;
but the fragrant substance did not stay on the outside as it went down,
but flowed inside his body from the outside. (WoT 7314–7325)
The Greek passage not only abbreviates the scene as a whole, the level of detail about the
machine itself, and the interpretive commentary that runs alongside the passages in Guido,
Lydgate, and Benoît, it seems as if the author does not himself understand or wonders if his
audience won’t understand the machine either; he glosses the loan-word βατσέλια, from the
Italian vascèllo, substituting it for a more familiar word for basins, λεκάνες.
96
Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 4. For a more detailed definition of her use of
the term companion species, see Haraway, When Species Meet, 15–19.
97
Littlewood, “Romantic Paradises,” 100.
Littlewood also identifies the essentially posthuman construction of such

gardens, arguing that the connection between woman and garden
holds good whether the author praises the garden for natural features, as in
the early romances, or more for its artificial features, as when the vegetation
becomes mosaics encrusted with precious stones to represent fruits (in
Belthandros and Chrysandza [287–291] real trees are lauded for appearing
to have been turned on a lathe), and when the water supply becomes a set-
ting for the mechanical toys that were so important a part of the technologi-
cal rivalry between the Caliphal and Imperial courts.98
The gardens are thus literary constructions of space that merge women
and flowers as well as nature and technology, and though Littlewood,
writing before the environmental turn, makes no mention of the broader
implications of these gardens, the ways in which women behave in them
offers a model of sustainable environmental engagement, a point made all
the more clear when contrasted with the unsustainable environmental
engagement of the autopoietic world beyond the garden—significantly, a
world in which women reared in gardens, such as the wives of Digenis and
Achilles, cannot survive. Making kin, as the women of romance do,
requires an acceptance of the subjectivity, the individuality, and irreplace-
ability of even radically dissimilar lives, what Haraway calls “making kin as
oddkin.”99 In the romances, women are more apt to do this than men—
who are more likely to kill animals and other unlike things than live peace-
fully among them. And yet, despite the violence towards animals via
hunting, violence towards women through rape, and violence towards
other men through combat, the romances prioritize a certain model of
autopoietic heroism, the result of which is the celebration of a patriarchal
system in which the monopoly on violence determines political legitimacy
and the ends of which are denuded landscapes devoid of rich plant life and
vegetation, devoid of the multispecies muddle.
In romances, the entire world beyond the enclosed garden is a war zone
governed only by the capacity to inflict and endure violence, and yet the
ideological position of the writers of romance—and much of the scholar-
98
Littlewood, “Romantic Paradises,” 99. The claim has been taken up more recently by
Ingela Nilsson: “The garden may also represent or reflect the female body: the most beauti-
ful, and yet the most dangers. Pleasure can be pure and chaste, but it can also be dangerous
and sinful” (“To Touch or Not to Touch,” 242).
99
226 A.J. GOLDWYN
ship on the subject—considers this an ideal state exemplifying models of

Byzantine heroism. Indeed, the romances are fundamentally about kin-
ning: the joining of two age- and class-appropriate heterosexuals into a
union for the production of progeny, for propagating their DNA in evolu-
tionary biological terms, for continuing dynastic lines and entrenching
power in sociological ones. In the world of romances, such kinning is an
intensely violent and competitive process: brothers, fathers, suitors, vas-
sals, and servants die in the lovers’ pursuit of their goal, while wives, aban-
doned girlfriends, even mothers, face serious threats of death and sexual
violence. And yet, even leaving aside the broken hearts and broken bones
that permeate the romances, even the successful lovers are frequently
unable to procreate: Digenis and his wife, Achilles and his wife, and Paris
and Helen are all explicitly unable to have children, and their unions rep-
resent the end of their patrilineal lines. If kinning and the marriage plot are
the primary motivators of the plot, they are as often unsuccessful as suc-
cessful, even among the most “heroic” of the characters. Even if the lov-
ers’ goal is procreation, autopoiesis has an uneven record. Sympoiesis,
however, and the oddkinning to which it gives rise, certainly offers a more
expansive vision of procreation, and perhaps a more successful one as well.
Feminist, queer, and ecocritical readings of these romances and simi-
larly ideological revisions of primary source material (such as Moraga’s
and Enoch’s Medeas), however, have shown the kinds of new interpreta-
tions that are made possible by reading from positions of alterity. In order
to mitigate the harmful real-world results of autopoietic thinking—a
thought process reinforced through uncritical readings of texts that incul-
cate the values of medieval patriarchy in modern readers—“we must,”
Haraway insists, “change the story,” and she offers a prescription for how
to do just that: “We can call our narrations ‘geostories,’ in which ‘all the
former props and passive agents have become active without, for that,
being part of a giant plot written by some overseeing entity.’”100 Indeed,
this method of interpretation is fundamental to ecocriticism: the passive
agents—in this case women, animals, and nature—become the central
protagonists, while the putative heroes become marginal. The gardens as
a literary space, moreover, lie outside the “giant plot”: while they may be
100
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 40. The citation is from Bruno Latour’s Gifford
Lectures: Latour, Bruno. “Facing Gaïa: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature.”
Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh, February 18–28, 2013.
either ekphrastic rhetorical ornamentation or even the location in which

important events of the plot take place, the plots themselves are not con-
cerned with the gardens; the sexual awakening of the aristocratic hero,
demonstrated through his destructive capacities, always remains the guid-
ing concern of romances.
In order to awaken an empathetic sense of kinship even with things
radically unlike ourselves—Haraway’s oddkinning—it is necessary to read
from perspectives of alterity, to hear the voices silenced by hegemonic nar-
rativity, to empathize with the objects of patriarchal violence and not
aspire to be like those who inflict such violence. In her discussion of the
problems of androcentric narration, Haraway argues for “the need to
change the story, to learn somehow to narrate—to think—outside the
prick tale of Humans in History, when the knowledge of how to murder
each other—and along with each other, uncountable multitudes of the
living earth—is not scarce.”101 This, however, remains unavoidably the
central concern of the medieval romance, much more so than the contem-
porary writing that is the subject of Haraway’s critique.
Though the medieval romances themselves, then, can’t be changed,
what can be changed is how they are read, how they are interpreted. For
Moraga and Enoch, the hero becomes the villain and the villain the hero;
just so could readers, scholars, and teachers of medieval romances refor-
mulate their criticism in such a way as to account for the immense harm
that the romance model of heroism entails. They could then reorient their
own perspectives towards the alternative models of standpoint criticism
and away from the master narratives propounded by those who hold
power. Through empathy with marginal figures and at odds with the nar-
ratorial interpretations embedded within the text, such readings would
expand the notion of kinship beyond the heroes, beyond their beloveds,
even beyond humans. Expanding the boundaries of kinship, of empathetic
alterities, is fundamental to the ecocritical and posthumanist projects, to
changing critical scholarship, and thus to inculcating ecofriendly practices
in the real world.
It is a sorry state indeed that there is not, in all the romances, an instance
of human–animal play, a central issue for Haraway and, in a medieval con-
text, for Karl Steel, who argues that “increased vigilance before animal
suffering” is but one aspect of “a worthy posthumanism [that] must

101
228 A.J. GOLDWYN
recognize both pathos and play.”102 Whereas Digenis and Achilles deny
their kinship with those of other religions, much less those of other spe-
cies, the behavior of their wives—at least in their pre-lapsarian gardens—
suggests a kinship bond with things even radically unlike them: ornamental
birds, animal automata, plants of all kinds. They protect them, nurture
them, live sustainably among them, in a way that their husbands don’t.
Readings that fail to recognize and celebrate the kinship between the
women of the gardens and the plants and animals that comprise their envi-
rons, while simultaneously celebrating the autopoietic masculine ideolo-
gies that result in widespread death and destruction, thus legitimate a set
of values that, like the rightly rejected medieval attitudes towards women,
religious pluralism, or illiberal political philosophies, no longer have pur-
chase—indeed are fundamentally at odds with—contemporary values.
In ways large and small, ideological and practical, then, medieval
authors and audiences lived at vast removes from their audiences today. In
a world before light pollution, climate change, mass extinction, and other
forms of environmental degradation, and, as importantly, a world before
the technological advancements that made such large-scale degradation
possible, medieval ideologies, and thus the ideologies encoded in medieval
texts, had relatively minimal ecological consequences, at least in the longue
durée of geological time. Today, however, the ecological consequences of
the uncritical perpetuation of pre-modern environmental ideology in the
Anthropocene are readily identifiable. While Byzantine Studies may not be
the central locus in which the environmental battles of the future are
fought, those who define and shape the field are nevertheless responsible
for the ethical discharge of their core responsibility of preserving and
transmitting knowledge of the medieval Greek past and of interpreting
that knowledge for contemporary and future communities, and environ-
mental care should be part of that mandate.
The importance of such work in disciplines outside the environmental
humanities has recently been gaining greater recognition among medie-
valists and Classicists who realize that, because of their foundational posi-
tion in the modern Western imagination, their fields have become a
battleground for the ahistorical fever dreams of white nationalists,
Islamophobes and anti-Semites, men’s rights activists, and other advocates
of illiberal and anti-humanist agendas. In this regard, two forthcoming
works may be harbingers of a scholarship more politically and culturally

102
engaged with the ethical dimension of Cultural Studies. For medievalists,

Andrew Elliott’s Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the
Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century analyzes the ways in which con-
temporary xenophobic, white nationalist, and other illiberal movements
seize on a blinkered vision of the medieval world to justify contemporary
ideology. In Classics, Donna Zuckerberg describes her forthcoming Not
All Dead White Men as “a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill
communities,” a branch of the so-called Men’s Rights Activist movement
whose “Constitution” echoes the misogyny of ancient and medieval writ-
ers. Its third article, for instance, entitled “Women, Logic & Emotional
Reasoning,” begins by noting that “Women are irrational and inconsis-
tent,” language that does not draw directly from Guido delle Colonne and
John Lydgate but that eerily echoes their critiques of women and certainly
draws on long traditions of misogynistic discourse.103 Zuckerberg and
Elliott are among an increasing number of scholars, academics, and public
intellectuals who are actively pushing back against the illiberal appropria-
tion of the ancient and medieval past through philologically and ethically
unsupportable readings. The case was perhaps most elegantly and most
forcefully made by Sierra Lomuto in her guest post on the “In the Middle”
blog:
When white nationalists turn to the Middle Ages to find a heritage for
whiteness—to seek validation for their claims of white supremacy—and they
do not find resistance from the scholars of that past; when this quest is cel-
ebrated and given space within our academic community, our complacency
becomes complicity. We have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the
knowledge we create and disseminate about the medieval past is not weap-
onized against people of color and marginalized communities in our own
contemporary world.104
Indeed, as if to exemplify the connection between contemporary illiberal

and misogynistic ideologies and medieval literature and the ways in which
even the most well-intentioned and seemingly apolitical scholarship can be
“weaponized” in just the way Lomuto describes, a recent blog post drew
from my own translation of the twelfth-century Byzantine grammarian
John Tzetzes’ Allegories of the Iliad to prove “the reality” that the propor-
tionally higher rate of violent deaths among men than women “attracts no
Illimitable Men, “The Red Pill Constitution.”

103
Lomuto, “White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies.”

104
230 A.J. GOLDWYN
more public concern than pervasive discrimination against men in criminal

justice systems, in family courts, and in reproductive rights. Men’s lives
don’t matter in gynocentric society, nor in dominant readings of the
Iliad.”105 In this, the author draws on a rather obscure Byzantine text to
demonstrate the critique of “Gynocentric Family Law” encoded in the
Red Pill Constitution: “In matters of law the courts always side with
women. The law prioritises female well-being over logic, honour and jus-
tice. Family law is as such corrupt, contemporarily ruled in its decision-
making by feminist dogma.”106 Byzantine Studies, then, whether its
gatekeepers and other professionals like it or not, is already part of the
broader values debate. Thus, if they can’t or won’t participate in direct
political action, Byzantinists can at least participate in the consciousness-
raising aspect of ecocriticism and other manifestations of standpoint criti-
cism by becoming aware of the ways in which their own work can either
comfort or resist illiberal ideologies. Stacy Alaimo suggests that
dwelling in the dissolve, where fundamental boundaries have begun to come

undone, unraveled by unknown futures, can be a form of ethical engage-
ment that emanates from both feminist and environmental practices. Such
practices are often improvisational, as activists, artists, and ordinary people
seek to make sense of the networks of harm and responsibility that entangle
even the most modest of actions, such as purchasing or disposing of any of
the trillions of plastic objects circulating through the twenty-first century
and thousands of years into the future.107
Among this group, too, is one whom Alaimo has curiously omitted: aca-
demics (like her). As scholars whose work is shaped by the Anthropocene,
as teachers grappling with the effects of climate change in the classroom,
and as residents on the only planet as yet hospitable to life, as beings
whose very existence on the planet is threatened by environmental
105
Galbi, “Achilles in Women’s Clothing: Tzetzes’s Allegorical Interpretation.” Galbi uses
Tzetzes in service of men’s rights activism again in another blog post entitled “Homer
Effaced Palamedes to Heroize Word-Twisting Odysseus,” in which he argues that:
“Palamedes attempted to live as a man of integrity within dominant gynocentric ideology.
When Helen and Paris illicitly fled from her husband to Troy, Palamedes supported the oath
of Helen’s suitors to defend her husband’s marital rights. Odysseus took a more critical posi-
tion. He refused to engage in violence against men over issues centering on women.”
106
h t t p s : / / i l l i m i t a b l e m e n . c o m / a r c h i v e s / u n d e r s t a n d i n g - t h e - r e d - p i l l /
red-pill-constitution/
107
Alaimo, Exposed, 2.
egradation, Byzantinists have an interest—recognized or not—in the

d
environmental movement. It is past time for Byzantinists to account for
the ethical contribution of their projects, not just the disciplinary contri-
bution. The Byzantine Studies of the future must place greater emphasis
on, and be more explicitly concerned with, the question of making kin;
the work must expand the empathetic imagination. Ecocritics working in
other periods, national languages, and artistic media along with their allies
in other activist disciplines have long modeled various ways of incorporat-
ing ecoethics into their scholarship, and it is past time for Byzantinists to
demonstrate the same concern, however they see fit to do so. The future
of the world—and thus of Byzantine Studies—depends on it.
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Index1
A Arab(s), 32, 49, 68, 70, 75, 75n112,

Abydos, 94, 99 78, 81, 90, 92, 98, 131n115,
Achilles, 1, 87n9, 217, 225, 226, 228, 148n3
230n105 Arcite, 45n19, 46–48, 47n26, 81
See also Tale of Achilles See also Knight’s Tale
A Cyborg Manifesto, 196, 196n17, Argonauts, 177
198, 221 Astrology, 148, 161, 162, 172
See also Haraway, Donna Automata, 211n71, 222, 222n92,
Aegean Sea, 22 222n93, 223n95, 228
Aeneas, 174, 193 Autopoiesis, 191–231
Alisoun, 42–46, 48 Aztlán, 182, 183n100, 184, 185,
See also Miller’s Tale 186n114, 187, 187n115
Androkles, 89, 90
Animal-standpoint criticism, 140, 227,
230 B
Animal Studies, 11n33, 23n68, Barbarian(s), 85, 88, 92, 95, 96, 98,
45n19, 49n34, 73, 139, 141–143 100, 105, 107, 108, 125,
Anthomorpism/anthormorphic 125–126n94, 126, 142, 176
(metaphor), 39, 92, 94, 101, 103, Barzon, 107
140, 168, 197, 204 Bears, 1, 47, 48, 57–60, 64, 102, 103,
Anthropocene, 1–7, 13, 18, 19, 155, 169, 174
29n88, 30, 33, 194–197, 203, Bede, 199
209, 215n77, 222, 228, 230 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, 155
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6
236 INDEX
Bird(s), 17, 43, 56, 66, 116–118, 205, Cromwell, Oliver, 174
211, 212, 212n72, 214, 218, Crutzen, Paul, 3
219, 228 Cyborg, 195–198, 195n13, 197n20,
Black Medea, 180n87, 180n88, 221, 221n90, 222, 224
180n89, 181n90, 181n91, See also A Cyborg Manifesto
181n92, 181n93, 183, 184, Cyborgs, 196, 197, 197n20
184n105
See also Enoch, Wesley
Boar(s), 47, 48 D
Britain, 21, 174, 198, 199 Deer, 58, 59
Byzantine Studies, 1–33, 200n26, Dendromorphism/dendromorphic
221–231 (metaphor), 41n7, 68, 90, 101,
102, 112, 114, 115, 140
Descartes René, 223, 223n94
C Digenis Akritis, 30, 30n92, 31n93, 39,
Canterbury Tales, 41, 42n10, 46n24, 86, 90, 98, 105, 126, 130, 148n3,
127, 128 149n7, 199, 203, 217, 219
Charikles, 105, 108–110, 108n43, Dionysos, 113, 117
112–117, 129–131, 142, 219, Dog(s), 180, 221, 221n90, 222, 224
220 Dosikles, 85–89, 91–102, 98n30,
Charles I, King of England, 174 99n33, 100n34, 104, 105, 107,
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 15, 42n10, 43n11, 108, 108n43, 117, 129, 130, 201
45n21, 46n24, 47n27, 47n29, Dove(s), 53, 54
48, 127n100, 127n101, Drosilla, 67n85, 105–118, 129–131,
128n102, 128n105, 176n82 142, 219, 220
See also Canterbury Tales, Knight’s Drosilla and Charikles, 105, 131, 142,
Tale, Miller’s Tale 219, 220
Chrétien de Troyes, 130n112, 132
Christian(s), 40, 75, 75n112, 86,
109n45, 160, 161, 164, 183, E
199, 200, 211n71, 223n94, Eagle(s), 51, 58, 205, 207, 218, 220
223n95 Eden, 51n41, 67
Christine de Pizan, 134 Edward I, King of England, 174
Christ, Jesus, 63, 74, 160 Egypt, 149–152
Chrysochroe, 89, 90, 92 Emelye, 45, 46, 46n25, 48, 56,
Chrysorroi, 148, 152 127–129
Colchis, 156, 179 See also Knight’s Tale
Consent, 51, 51n42, 52, 52n44, Emir, The (Digenis’ father), 40,
52n45, 54n48, 60, 62, 64, 46n25, 48–56, 49n35, 51n42,
68–72, 71n97, 76n114, 79–81, 52n45, 53–54n48, 62n72,
85, 184 75n112, 79, 88, 148n3, 149n7,
Constantinople, 21, 22, 29n86 177, 199
INDEX
237
Enoch, Wesley, 180, 180n87, 180n88, 202, 203n37, 203n38, 208,

182, 184, 187, 188, 192, 193, 209n62, 215n77, 220–222,
226, 227 220n88, 221n89, 221n90,
Eros, 123, 131n117, 220 222n91, 224–227, 224n96,
Erotokritos, 31 225n99, 226n100, 227n101, 229
Eugenianos, Niketas, 105–108, 114, Hawk(s), 53, 54, 56, 61, 205
115n60, 129 Henry IV, King of England, 175
Euripides, 187, 193n9 Henry V, King of England, 175
Hercules, 155n27, 155n28, 177
Historia Destructionis Troiae, 158, 162
F See also Guido delle Colonne (Guido
Falcon(s), 53, 205, 207 del Columnis)
Horse(s), 51, 59–61, 107, 137, 150,
198
G Hungry Woman, The, 182n96,
Galileo Galilei, 2 182n97, 183, 183n98, 183n100,
Garden, 22, 40, 46, 48, 51n41, 64, 183n101, 183n102, 183n103,
64n75, 64n76, 66–69, 184, 184n104, 184n106,
67–68n85, 76, 78, 79, 81, 86, 184n107, 185n110, 185n111,
87n9, 107, 110–112, 115, 118, 186, 186n114, 187
119n69, 122, 123, 130n111, See also Moraga, Cherríe
130n112, 135, 140, 191, 192 Hunters, 41–64, 67, 75, 92, 177, 191,
Gatherers, 191 193, 194, 203, 205
Goat(s), 106, 218, 219 Hunting, 47, 49, 49n35, 50n37, 51,
Gobryas, 92n23, 95–100, 98n30, 107 51n40, 54, 56, 57, 60, 61, 61n69,
Golden Fleece, 156, 167, 177, 178, 180 75n114, 81, 92, 100n34, 102,
Graft(ing), 103, 104, 113, 217 141, 191, 204, 216, 217, 221, 225
Grape(s), 85, 86, 91, 92, 100, 106, Hysine and Hysminias, 87n9, 118,
107, 109n46, 111–113, 118, 142, 217
124, 125, 125n90, 141 See also Makrembolites, Eumathios/
Greece, 20, 22, 74, 148n4 Eustathios
Guido delle Colonne (Guido del Hysmine, 87n9, 118–126, 129, 130,
Columnis), 155, 158, 186, 142, 217, 219, 220
223n95, 229 Hysminias, 118, 123–126, 125n90,
Guinevere, 132–134 130, 217
H I
Haraway, Donna, 194, 194n10, Iliad, 1, 229, 230
195n12, 195n13, 196–198, Islam, 75
196n14, 196n15, 196n16, Ivy, 101, 109, 109n46, 112n52, 115,
196n17, 197n18, 197n19, 201, 117, 124, 142
238 INDEX
J 169n65, 169n66, 173n74,

James I, King of England, 174 174–176, 175n79, 175n80,
Jason/Jasón, 13, 156, 165, 167, 168, 175n81, 179, 186, 223–224n95,
171–174, 176–181, 176n82, 229
183–187, 187n115
Julien Offray de la Mettrie, 223
M
Makrembolites, Eumathios/
K Eustathios, 118, 126n94, 129
Kallimachos, 148n4, 152–154, Manhattan Medea, 179, 179n86
154n26, 178 See also Loher, Dea
Kallimachos and Chrysorroi, 147–155 Maximou, 61n68, 63, 71–73, 71n97,
Kleandros, 109n45, 113, 114 73n104, 75, 76n114, 200
Kleinias, 109, 110, 115 Medea, 155–188, 193, 226
Klitovon, 148 Mediterranean Sea, 21, 30
Knight of the Cart, 130n112 Meleagant, 130n112, 134
See also Chrétien de Troie Miller’s Tale, 41, 45
Knight’s Tale, 45, 46n25, 51, 56n51, See also Canterbury Tales
81, 127 Mistylos, 96, 97, 98n30
See also Canterbury Tales Moraga, Cherríe, 182, 182n96,
Kratandros, 89–92, 102 182n97, 183n98, 183n100,
183n101, 183n102, 183n103,
184–188, 184n104, 184n106,
L 184n107, 185n108, 185n109,
Lancelot, 130n112, 132–134 185n110, 185n111, 186n113,
Le Guin, Ursula, 191–194, 191n3, 186n114, 192, 193, 226, 227
193n7, 193n8, 202, 217 Murder, 54n48, 63, 73, 75, 80, 88,
Leopards, 58, 207, 210 187, 227
Lions, 47, 48, 51, 55–57, 55–56n51, Myrilla, 102
56n52, 60, 67, 76, 77, 80, 90,
91, 104, 200, 201, 204, 205,
207, 208, 210, 215, 216 N
Livistros and Rodamni, 131, 131n117, Narratology, 43, 62n72, 85, 178, 192,
132, 147, 178 193
Loher, Dea, 179, 179n86, 187 Nausikrates, 92, 92–93n23, 93, 107
Lomuto, Sierra, 229, 229n104 Normandy, 21
Loving in the War Years, 186n113
See also Moraga, Cherríe
Lydgate, John, 156, 162–165, O
163n46, 163n47, 163n48, Oak, 109, 109n45, 112n52, 114, 115,
163n49, 164n50, 164n51, 117, 142
164n52, 164n53, 164n54, Ottomans, 21
164n55, 168–171, 168n64, Ovid, 160
INDEX
239
P S
Palamon, 45–48, 45n19, 47n26, Sen, Nabaneeta Dev, 178, 178n83, 179
81 Serpent, 51, 51n41, 67, 168
Pandrouklos, 205 Sexual assault, 81, 105, 108, 121, 136
Paris, 123, 226, 230n105 Shakespeare, William, 14, 18n61
Parthians, 106, 107, 140, 142 Solastalgia, 181, 182, 182n94,
Partridges, 56, 57, 61, 77, 205 182n95, 187
Philopappous, 55n51, 61n68, 76, Sosthenes, 118, 119, 219
77 Sympoiesis, 191
Phoenix, AZ, 182–185, 187
Plane Trees, 101, 211, 211n70, 212,
214, 215, 217 T
Plantaganets, 21 Tale of Achilles, 203–217, 219, 220, 223
Posthumanism, 227 Tale of the Shepherdess, 137
Prodromos, Theodore, 31, 86n3, 87, Tetraktys, 103–105, 201, 201n29,
92, 99, 100, 102–105, 104n39, 205, 207
107, 108, 129 Thessaly, 179
Tigers, 47, 48
Trojans, 174–176, 178, 179
R Trojan Women, 193n9
Rape, 40, 41n8, 52n44, 62n72, 67, See also Euripides
69, 69–70n90, 70, 73–75, 80, Troy, 174, 176n82, 177–179, 230n105
81, 85–143, 184, 185, 219, Troy Book, 162, 163n47, 163n48,
225 163n49, 164n50, 164n51,
Reeve’s Tale, 128 164n52, 164n54, 164n55,
See also Canterbury Tales 168n64, 169n65, 169n66,
Rhodanthe, –, 87, 89, 91–99, 101, 173n74, 175n79, 175n80, 175n81
102, 105, 112, 117 See also Lydgate, John
Rhodanthe and Dosikles, 85–89, 87n6, Tzetzes, John, 229, 230n105
91–99, 98n30, 99n33, 101, 102,
104, 105, 107, 112, 117, 129,
130, 201 V
See also Prodromos, Theodore Verderichos, 150
Rhodes, 85, 92n23, 96, 106 Vines, 85, 86, 92–95, 100, 101, 104,
Richard III, King of England, 174 104n39, 105, 111, 113, 118,
Rodamni, 131, 147–155 124, 141, 218
Roman de la Rose, 134–136 Vineyards, 85, 105, 113
Roman de Troie, 155, 158n33, Virgil, 193
173n73, 174, 223n95
Roses, 45, 65, 65n78, 66, 101–103,
109n46, 111, 112, 118, 122, W
124, 125, 135, 141, 166, 174, War of Troy, 155, 178, 207n51,
220 223n95
240 INDEX
Wine, 85, 86, 91–94, 118n68, 119, Z

120, 219 Zoomorphism/zoomorphic
Witches, 147–188 (metaphor), 39–81, 90, 92, 140,
141, 168, 197, 204, 207, 208
X
Xicanadyke, 187

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T H E N E W M I D D L E A G E S

More information about this series at

The New Middle Ages

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956127

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover image: PRISMA ARCHIVO / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

A substantial financial investment in this work was provided by the

a decade, she has painstakingly revised thousands of lines of translation

Byz.Ach. The Tale of Achilles = The Byzantine Achilleid, edited by Ole

L&R Livistros and Rodamni. Lambert, J.A. Le Roman de Libistros et

1 Byzantine Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis 1

2 Zoomorphic and Anthomorphic Metaphors in the

3 Rape, Consent, and Ecofeminist Narratology

4 Witches and Nature Control in the Palaiologan Romances

5 Byzantine Posthumanism: Autopoiesis, Sympoiesis,

Byzantine Studies in an Age

ἐν μὲν γαῖαν ἔτευξ᾽, ἐν δ᾽ οὐρανόν, ἐν δὲ θάλασσαν,

© The Author(s) 2018 1

See, for instance, O’Connor, Resurrection Science.

Buell, Environmental Imagination.

position as subject rather than background in literary texts,19 and just as

Ecocriticisms and Intersectionalities Present

These questions led me to the academic discourse of ecocriticism, which

as narrative texts, but in recent years having come to include a much

a general introduction nor a broad defense,25 some questions remain in

As a discourse developing from and in response to this crisis, then, eco-

intersecting with the work of scholar-activists working within other theo-

ecofeminism’s basic premise is that the ideology which authorizes oppres-

No less than the binaries of Eurocentrism, racism, and sexism, Nature/

cally conforms to a seemingly endless series of human exclusions [that]

a growing coalition that unites socialists and anarchists with environmen-

It would be quixotic to suppose that a work of literary criticism might be an

In response to this line, the Shakespearean ecocritic Timothy Egan argues

The pre-political model of ecocriticism has also appeared in medieval

The pervasiveness of this ecocritical model for medieval studies can be

ecocriticism by medievalists has moved steadily away from its origins in

Towards a Byzantine Ecocriticism and the Ethical

Buell, “Some Emerging Trends,” 105.

first-wave ecocriticism began as a nation-focused and especially as an Anglo-­

This broadened mandate has already seen much progress: Environment

Introducing Byzantine studies to ecocritics can, moreover, shape how

The spiritual aspects of the environment in hagiographical and theo-

methodological pathways for transferring modes of analysis developed for

offerings in the environmental humanities—the causes and consequences

issues? Can Byzantine studies play a role in direct academic activism or in

(AEIB), nor its national subgroups, including the Byzantine Studies

These questions tie in again to the related issues of the Anthropocene

Like these other disciplines, Byzantine studies advocates a certain kind of

Ecocriticism and the Medieval Greek Romance

seventeenth-­century Erotokritos at the end; the last, Beaton argues, was

literature (broadly conceived) or cultural production can be studied inno-

Gaard, Greta. 1993. Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature. In

Kordecki, Lesley. 2011. Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds.

Zoomorphic and Anthomorphic Metaphors

© The Author(s) 2018 39

nevertheless can be treated as a “proto-romance” in the sense that many

agricultural and pasture land.7 When analyzed ecocritically, such meta-

Lovers as Hunters and Gardeners in Chaucer:

elaborate description of Alisoun, the young woman at the center of a love

She was ful moore blisful on to see

Sweeter was she by far to look upon

1 Byzantine Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis 1

2 Zoomorphic and Anthomorphic Metaphors in the

3 Rape, Consent, and Ecofeminist Narratology

4 Witches and Nature Control in the Palaiologan Romances

5 Byzantine Posthumanism: Autopoiesis, Sympoiesis,

first-wave ecocriticism began as a nation-focused and especially as an Anglo-

seventeenth-century Erotokritos at the end; the last, Beaton argues, was

systematic disenfranchisement of women in the romance and abnegates

relationship is depicted as a flowering garden, the failed relationship is