ABSTRACT
As a detour from the main trajectory of the book, this chapter examines reasons for not looking to the Iliad and the Odyssey for guidance in addressing the climate crisis and agricultural crisis we face. After all, the society described in the Homeric epics is alien to us in many ways: it is patriarchal, slave-holding, monarchical, and polytheistic. Can we perhaps find inspiration instead in Egyptian or Mesopotamian gods and myths, or in African epics or Eastern systems of thought? To explore this possibility, I give special attention to the Epic of Gilgamesh and to the Chinese notion of “ecological civilization”. I conclude the chapter, though, by explaining (i) why I find exceptionally strong guidance in the Homeric epics and (ii) why those of us (in the West) who have most directly inherited the values first laid down in the Iliad and the Odyssey also have the most direct obligation to use the elements of those narratives to create a new epic – one that draws from the Homeric epics not for their violence and rage and all the rest, but instead for their lessons of aristea and nostos and thereby emphasizing our own “longest day of battle” and our own “final journey home”.
