I recently read a poem about a fearsome warrior who brought a decade-old war away from city walls to a nearby riverbank. As the waters began to glut with bodies, the god that possessed it became enraged. Taking revenge for the damage humans had done to the great river, he almost drowned the warrior.
Trudging back through the city, corpses and discarded weapons all around him, the warrior was humbled. Acknowledging the error of his ways, he had learned that the forces of nature are inviolable and ultimately superior to the whims of man.
The story wasn’t a modern allegory for protecting our climate from the perils of human greed. It was part of Homer’s Iliad, written some 3,000 years ago. For Dr Wayne Rimmer, who has researched the epic poem and now works to make it as accessible as possible for modern readers, the scene offers a way to interpret Homer’s heroes as eco-warriors battling to protect nature from mutilation by man.
