Olympic Trees

As the centrepiece of an ode for an Olympic victor, the ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar stages an encounter between the hero Heracles and the trees of the mythological Hyperboreans, which Heracles takes back to Greece to acculturate Olympia, the site of his Games. A close reading of Pindar’s original Greek text negotiates both the form and the experience of Heracles’ arboreal encounter. And it sets Pindaric form in relation to both the history of the reception of Pindar’s poem and the intersection between aspects of twenty-first-century ecocriticism and Nietzsche’s critique of historical consciousness within Classics. A reading of Heracles’ Hyperborean stance explores both the scale of human being in the world and the ongoing question of our relation to the environment, in terms of our differentiation from it and in the negotiation of loss and distance as mediated by the formal affordances of classical lyric poetics.