This book identifies and analyses, on the basis of recently discovered sources and original research, three story-patterns associated with human kingship in early Greek and ancient Near Eastern myth. The first, which I call the Myth of the Servant, is a well-attested but so far unrecognised story-pattern that was used to explain how an individual of non-royal lineage rose to power from obscure origins. As will be shown in Chapter 1, this myth is first documented in connection with the early Mesopotamian king Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Old Akkadian dynasty in the third millennium bc. In later periods the story-pattern was applied to other rulers who seemingly emerged from nowhere and created influential new royal dynasties: these include king David of Israel and Judah (according to the Hebrew Bible), and Gyges of Lydia, Cyrus of Persia and Semiramis of Assyria (according to Greek historians).

Although kings are often central to the extant literary (and other textual) evidence from Mesopotamia, the wider Near East and the eastern Mediterranean, the texts themselves were usually authored by others, such as poets, priests, prophets or scholars. If mortal kings typically claimed to rule thanks to divine support, these latter characters similarly tended to base their authority on their ability to articulate and enact the divine will. Inevitably perhaps, the stage was set for narratives of conflict between kings and other intermediaries of the divine. This chapter shows that the ancient sources again exhibit a consistent pattern: it is always the king who initiates the conflict, often in a military context. The king is not necessarily impious, but shows casual disregard for the divine will, despite the information offered by a reliable intermediary. This is invariably depicted as an act of folly. The negative consequences soon become apparent, but they are usually borne primarily by the people whom the king was supposed to lead. The first attestations are found in Sumerian sources from early Mesopotamia. The other main bodies of evidence are the Hebrew Bible and the early Greek epics of Homer and Hesiod.

This chapter identifies a well-attested but so far unrecognised story-pattern that was used to explain how an individual of non-royal lineage rose to power from obscure origins: the Myth of the Servant. The myth is first documented in connection with the early Mesopotamian king Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Old Akkadian dynasty in the third millennium BC. In later periods the story-pattern was applied to other rulers who seemingly emerged from nowhere and created influential new royal dynasties: these include king David of Israel and Judah (according to the Hebrew Bible), and Gyges of Lydia, Cyrus of Persia and Semiramis of Assyria (according to Greek historians). In some parts of the ancient Near East the Myth of the Servant was also used to explain the early history of divine kingship among the gods.

This chapter offers a new and original analysis of what I call the Myth of the Goddess and the Herdsman: here the fundamental claim is that the mortal king engaged in a sexual relationship with a powerful female deity (Inana or Ištar in Mesopotamia, Aphrodite or Venus in the Greco-Roman world). As shown here, this relationship is merely the central episode of a longer story-pattern. The myth in full begins with the preparations of the union and the sexual union itself, and continues with the male lover’s transgression and his divine punishment. The punishment leads to lamentation, which in turn paves the way for a conciliatory ending, which is again achieved by divine intervention. Here the sources include Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from the late third millennium BC onwards, a variety of evidence from the wider ancient Near East, and Greek poems on the mythical early rulers of Cyprus and Troy. The last adaptation – the union of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite, which produced the future Trojan leader Aeneas – was of special importance in the Greco-Roman world, as it was eventually claimed to be the mythical basis of Augustus’ right to rule as the first Roman emperor.

Chapter 6 reads Horace’s Odes as thoroughly place-based lyric poetry. The chapter begins by differentiating its approach from landscape and symbolic readings of place. It organizes an account of the Odes around the concepts of place and place attachment, familiar from the Eclogues. Horace represents dynamic experiences of specific localities, constituted by human and nonhuman beings. He anchors his poetry to particular locations, while also making those locations real-and-textual sites of Horatian poetry. In addition, Horace represents place as helping to produce and shape his poetry through tropes of lyric ecology and poetic reciprocity. The second half of the chapter complicates this place-based reading of Horace by attending to the pervasive theme of mobility in the Odes. It argues that Horace models a translocal poetics, in which locality is continually fashioned and refashioned through forms of translation and transport. Whereas forced movement in the Eclogues means the end of local dwelling and local song alike, for Horace mobility helps create both his local place attachments and a form of lyric that is place-based but not place-bound.

The epilogue briefly considers Ovid’s exile poetry from an environmental and place-based perspective. Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetry does not need to rely on a positive attachment to a local land. His exile poetry is about and is marked by place, shaped by the location from which Ovid is estranged and the location in which he writes. Moreover, local place matters to Ovid as a particular more-than-human environment. Tomis is represented as an environment with its own specific geography, climate, and ecologies. Ovid further explores ecological themes by emphasizing the physical effects Tomis has on his body, through motifs of cold and sickness. The epilogue also uses Ovid’s exilic work to clarify the theoretical foundations of the environmental poetics identified in Vergil and Horace. Through his provocative play with intertextuality and fictionality, Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetics can rely not on realistic description or extratextual reference, but rather on the poetic imagination.

The ecological thinking of the Georgics leads to intricate problems of scale, which Chapter 4 traces. The poem seeks to conceptualize humans’ place in their local environments – epitomized by the bounded space of the farm – while also imagining life at larger scales and attempting to think the world as a coherent whole. The chapter connects these issues to political, geographical, agricultural, philosophical, and poetical questions. This chapter finds in the Georgics a searching exploration of what it means to be local, and whether such a thing is even possible in the age of Jupiter and the time of Caesar. Ultimately, the poem rethinks a more nuanced concept of locality that is intertwined with the global, and is of shifting, unpredictable scale: a concept of fractal locality. At the center of the poem, Vergil places a fitting emblem for a fractally local poetry, the temple he vows in his native Mantua. This temple models Vergil’s achievement as anchored in particular place, and yet in a place that has become local, Roman, Italian, and global all at once.

In contrast to anthropocentric readings of the Georgics, chapter 3 argues that Vergil is interested in farming as a way of considering the entangled lives of humans and nonhumans. The chapter contextualizes Vergil’s ecological thinking – highlighting influences from ancient philosophy, ethnography, Hesiod, and Roman agricultural treatises – and differentiates this reading from interpretations that shoehorn the relations of humans and nonhumans into a nature–culture binary. The chapter examines how the poem discloses agriculture as a practice of managing ecological relations. The second half of the chapter then queries the status of the human within its ecologies. While much of the poem denies human exceptionality, it does recognize ways in which humans stand out from the rest of the world, above all in their unparalleled ability to transform their environments – epitomized by the world-altering activities of Rome and Caesar. Ultimately, the chapter connects the peculiar status of the human to the didactic aims of the poem. By relaying and explaining the signa of the world, the Georgics offers the fantasy of an expertise that can better embed humans in their environments.