The Atasthalocene

This essay is a companion to The Anthropocene Strait, which charted the fourteen rocks between us and a safe and just harbour. That one was about the waters. This one is about a single word — the word for how ships actually sink.

Today, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is opening in cinemas around the world. The oldest sea story in the Western canon, on the largest screens our species has built; tens of millions of people are about to spend almost three hours inside a poem that is nearly three thousand years old. If you are one of them, this essay asks a small favour of you before the lights go down.

Listen for line seven.

The Odyssey does not open with its hero. It opens with a job description — a man, unnamed, “of many turns” — and then, before that man has even been identified, the poet does something no screenwriting manual would permit: he spoils the ending. By the seventh line we already know that the crew will not make it home, and we already know why. They perished by their own recklessness — αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο. Not by the sea. Not by the gods. Not by the monsters that the film’s trailers promise. By their own atasthalíai — their reckless follies. The first judgment in the poem is a verdict, and it is delivered before the story begins.¹

Then, in case anyone thought the poet was speaking only for himself, heaven repeats it. The first god to open his mouth in the Odyssey is Zeus, and the first thing he does is complain about our habit of blaming him. Mortals hold the gods responsible for their sufferings, he says, when it is by their own recklessness that they suffer beyond their allotted portion — ὑπὲρ μόρον, hypèr móron, beyond what fate had actually assigned them (1.32–34). His example is Aegisthus, who seduced a queen and murdered a king — and Zeus’s point is not that Aegisthus sinned, but that Aegisthus was told. The gods sent Hermes in person to warn him, by name, of exactly what would follow (1.37–43). He did it anyway. Twice, then, in the first thirty-four lines — once from the poet, once from heaven — the poem states its thesis: the suffering that breaks us is mostly the portion we add ourselves.

The word at the centre of this is strange and old. Philologists throw up their hands at atásthalos: the great etymological dictionaries — Chantraine, Beekes — file its origin as unknown². Greek ears heard átē inside it, the goddess-noun of blind ruin, the delusion that Homer says walks over the heads of men — though the vowels do not quite agree, and the connection may be something speakers felt rather than something the word descends from. It is, in other words, a word older than its own explanation, kept alive because nothing else named the thing so exactly. And Homer uses it almost always in the plural: not a disposition, not a character flaw, but a count — reckless follies, one after another, each individually survivable, jointly fatal. Weld it to the suffix our epoch-names already carry — -cene, from kainós, “recent” — exactly as Anthropocene was built, and you get Atasthalocene: the age of reckless folly.

Once you have heard the word, you find it standing at the graveside of nearly everyone in epic. Sthenelus uses the identical formula for the Seven against Thebes — they perished by their own recklessness (Iliad 4.409) — a whole generation of heroes filed under the same cause of death as Odysseus’s crew. Hector, in the most devastating use in either poem, turns it on himself: standing alone before the walls of Troy, waiting for Achilles, he admits that he destroyed his own people by his recklessness (Iliad 22.104) — he had been warned to withdraw the army, and refused. And when Penelope is told that the suitors lie dead in her hall, she reaches for the same word: through their own reckless follies they suffered evil (Odyssey 23.67). The poem that opens on the verdict closes on it too.

But here is what the word insists on, every single time it appears, and what makes it different from sin, folly, hubris, or any of its usual translations: none of these people were ignorant. Aegisthus had Hermes. Hector had Polydamas, reading the omens at his shoulder. The crew were warned twice, in nearly identical words — by the ghost of Tiresias among the dead, and by Circe on her island, warnings their captain carried back to them — that the cattle of the Sun were the one thing they must not touch. The suitors watched the old seer Halitherses decode an omen of eagles that named their fate, and scoffed at him. Atasthalía is not ignorance, and it is not fate. It is the third thing, the one we still lack an English word for: conduct on the far side of a warning that was received, understood, and set aside. Homer’s fools always know.

Which is why the word belongs to us now, more than to any crew that ever sailed. We are the most thoroughly warned civilisation that has ever existed. Our Hermes does not come once, in winged sandals; he arrives on a publication schedule — assessment reports, boundary updates, sentinel datasets, each one a god walking into the hall and saying, by name, what follows from the course we are on. Even hypèr móron now has a unit of measure: the planetary boundaries framework is, almost literally, the science of the beyond-portion — the quantified line past which we are no longer drawing on our allotment but on someone else’s, and seven of the nine are crossed. And we have kept the oldest habit of all. We no longer blame the gods; we blame the market, the physics, the previous generation, the other hemisphere. Zeus’s complaint has outlived his religion.

This is where a name stops being decoration and starts being a rudder — because names are the smallest stories we tell, the smallest mythurgies, and the story decides what conduct seems available. Anthropocene names the agent: accurate, and a dead end, because no one can stop being ánthrōpos. It describes; it does not diagnose; it quietly suggests that the wound is identical with the species, and a story in which the problem is what we are has no next chapter. Atasthalocene names the conduct — and conduct, unlike essence, can stop. It is the harsher name, because it strips away every alibi the way Zeus strips Aegisthus’s. And it is the more hopeful one, for exactly the reason Zeus gives: the suffering beyond our portion was never allotted. It was chosen — is being chosen, follies plural, one quarter and one barrel and one cleared hectare at a time — and what is chosen can be chosen otherwise.

The Greeks knew both stories, and it matters which one they made the Odyssey. It is not a shipwreck poem. It is a nóstos — a homecoming — the story of the one sailor who heard the same warnings as everyone else and, imperfectly, ruinously slowly, with lapses the poet does not hide, kept turning back toward the harbour. The film you may watch tonight ends the way the poem does: someone gets home. That was always the point of spoiling the crew’s fate in line seven — the poet tells you at the start how easy it is to die of your own follies, so that you spend the whole poem watching what it costs to refuse to.

Then the lights come up, and you walk out of the theatre into the Atasthalocene — the real one, the one with the warnings already delivered and the ending not yet written. The first word of the Odyssey is man — ándra, a single sailor. The first half of Anthropocene is man again — ánthrōpos, the whole species this time. What the poem spends twelve thousand lines proving is that the man was never the story.

The choices are.

Read further

• The Anthropocene Strait — the companion essay: fourteen named rocks, from Monomorphia to Aphysia, and the science of the crossing.
• The Mythurgic Age — the theory this essay’s wager rests on: names and stories as labour, organizing conduct long before they are true.
• The Anthropocene Traps — long-form reference — the research behind the chart, including the ordeals of Odysseus read against the fourteen traps.
• The Anthropocene Traps — interactive companion — a small simulation that lets you feel the traps pulling on one another.
• Lexicon — Atasthalocene among the other proposed names for our epoch, from Capitalocene to Humilocene.