Other Materialisms: Human and Nonhuman in Martial Elegy

Abstract:New-materialistic studies of early Greek poetry have focused on the Homeric epics and on their intersections with the concepts of "entanglement" or the "assemblage," both of which acknowledge the interwovenness of humans and objects. This paper focuses on martial elegy, especially the compositions of Tyrtaeus and Archilochus, and shows that while some passages coincide with new-materialistic descriptions of assemblages, such poems place greater emphasis on the sorts of concepts explored by object-oriented ontologists: the agency of objects, their independence from human control, and human ignorance of object-object interactions.