The Research Centre for Greek and Latin Literature of the Academy of Athens is delighted to announce the online lecture by Beth Harper (Hong Kong) on ‘Labour, leisure and inner freedom: figuring the gardener in classical Chinese and Latin poetry’. The lecture will take place on Thursday 13 February 2025, 09.00 New York / 14.00 London / 16.00 Athens / 22.00 Beijing.
Abstract
By focusing in on the figure of the gardener (as opposed to the long and well-documented history of both Chinese and European conceptions of the garden), I show how this encounter between human being and natural environment connects to larger questions of the dialectical role of labour and leisure, freedom and duty, ideology and power. Isolated from political and social organization, the gardener presents that aspect of human nature which is private and individual and whose highest embodiment may be the poet, or perhaps, the sage. In reading comparatively, I show how these two literary traditions demonstrate a shared lingering on the gardener as a figure who knows what it might mean to be properly alive and free. Set against the values of utility, service and violent subjugation of the natural world, these poetic representations of the gardener found in imperial writers (Virgil, Horace, Columella, Tao Yuanming, Xie Lingyun, Xie Tiao, and friends), I suggest, transcend the values of Confucian or Augustan orthodoxy to question the limits of the political in human life. If the discourse of cultivating gardens presents a millennia-long elite conversation about value and meaning-making within and beyond political power and orthodoxy, how might these two poetic traditions from opposite ends of Eurasia speak to the enactment of an intimacy of with nature as grounds for human authenticity?
To receive the ZOOM link email mkonaris@academyofathens.gr
The talk forms part of a series of lectures on the representation of nature and natural imagery in ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese and Japanese literature. For the programme see here: https://www.academyofathens.gr/en/ereyna/kentra/ereyna-latinikis/kyklos-omilion-2025