Animals in the Classical World

Ethical Perspectives from Greek and Roman Texts

A. Harden

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230276611
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319319
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This sourcebook presents nearly 200 specially-translated Greek and Roman texts from Homer to Plutarch, revealing the place of the animal in the moral consciousness of the Classical era. Philosophical, historical, dramatic and poetic texts explore how animals were regarded in all aspects of ancient life, from philosophy to farming.

Part I

Defining ‘Animal’: Ancient Writers on Animal Nature

1

Animal Origins, Minds and Capacities

From the earliest stages of Classical literature, ancient writers were occupied with the origins of, and the differences between, men and animals. The Presocratic philosophers attempted some scientific explanations of the origins of the various species, from Anaximander in the early sixth century BC (with his puzzling but prescient statement that men owe their origins to fish)¹ to the fifth-century Archelaus’s two-stage view on the emergence of short-lived versions of all species followed by the development of species which were able to reproduce, and his contemporary Empedocles’s theory of the random spontaneous emergence of body parts which gradually joined together in a progressive series of extinctions and survivals, in which human and animal body parts occasionally (and unsuccessfully) mixed. These ideas come tantalizingly close to our privileged modern knowledge of evolution by natural selection, and it is no coincidence that the theory of common origins came from Empedocles, a philosopher who urged abstention from cruelty and sacrifice (see below, §§148–9), but unfortunately his position attracted continuous criticism throughout the Classical period and, as Gordon Campbell notes, it remained the case that ‘Plato and Aristotle have been far more influential to the formation of modern thought’² with their ideas on animal behaviour and capabilities formulated in the sophisticated culture of philosophical debate in fifth-century Athens. Lacking our concrete knowledge of evolution, most Classical authors were able to write comfortably in terms of a rigid hierarchy of species, arranged in minute classifications between which species may not move. ‘The different species had always been separate from each other: there was no point in history when their lines of development converged. Actually the different species had no lines of development. A lion had always been a lion, and a pig had always been a pig’.³ This in turn encouraged the notion of the separateness and superiority of humans: realistically, Aristotle is happy to include man as an example of a type of animal in his discussion of species classification in Parts of animals (642b; also §103 below), and Plato (Statesman 263d) noted the arbitrariness of separating out man on biological grounds, but man had something that animals did not and this difference formed the basis of the ethical horizons of the majority of ancient writers. Similarly, without the knowledge that the various domestic species had been selectively bred from wild ancestors over the course of millennia, writers like Cicero (§31 below) can be excused for thinking that sheep and cattle had been created by the gods for our benefit rather than gradually manipulated because of humans in the distant past.

Several accounts of the origin of life detail animals and men emerging together from a primitive beginning, with man then overtaking animals in intellectual development. Man, according to Aristotle, was absolutely separate from the other animals and was superior by virtue of his endowment with logos (that is, articulate speech and reason): one explanation for this, from the Prometheus myth, casts Prometheus and Epimetheus as divine agents responsible for these species differences. These differences, and the reasons for them, became a crucial factor in the debate over how animals were to be treated, and only occasionally do figures emerge who urge restraint from cruelty to animals. The following passage of Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound contains a view of the graduated differentiating of man from animals at some time in the mythological past. The play was performed in Athens some time between 479 BC and the author’s death in 456 BC: in this excerpt, the speaker Prometheus has been chained to a rock for bringing fire to mortals and is explaining to a chorus of nymphs how he has benefitted mankind.

1 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 447–99

‘Before I helped men, though they could hear, they heard not; and though they could see, they saw not. They rather resembled shapes of dreams, living out their long lives in a random jumble: they did not know how to set up brick-built houses against the sun, nor wood-working, but they lived underground like scurrying ants in the dark and deepest recesses of sunless caves. Nor did they have reliable markers of the onset of winter or blossoming spring or fruitful summer, but they carried on without knowledge (gnômê) until I showed them the risings and settings of the stars, which are hard to interpret. Moreover, for them I discovered numbers, outstanding of all sciences, and the combination of letters [into words] which is the means of remembering all things and is the mother of the creative arts of the Muses. And I first brought wild creatures under the yoke, so that they became slaves (douleuô) to the yoke-strap and saddle, so that they might relieve men of their heaviest burdens; and to the chariot I harnessed horses and made them love the rein, a luxurious delight for men of great wealth. It was I, and none other, who invented the sailor’s linen-winged vessels that wander the sea. [ ... ]

‘The greatest [thing I contrived] was this. If anyone became sick, there was no remedy for them, neither food nor ointment nor drink, but they withered for want of medicines before I showed them how to mix the healing remedies which they now use to ward off disease. I set out for them the many kinds of prophetic craft: I first interpreted from dreams what would happen in reality, and the difficult task of interpreting chance utterances or ominous occurrences on journeys. Of birds-of-prey I precisely defined their flights (which ones are auspicious, and which are sinister), their ways of life, and their hatreds, affections and companionships; I explained the smoothness of internal organs, what colour of bile will please the gods, the speckled texture and proper shape of the liver-lobe; I burned the thigh-bones and long spine wrapped in fat. I led mortals to this difficult skill and enabled them to see signs in the flames, signs to which they had hitherto been blind’.

Prometheus then goes on to claim responsibility for the discovery of metals. This picture of man’s development is a sequential and progressive account of man’s gradual separation from animals: man’s successive endowments of shelter, the key skills for agriculture (awareness of the seasons) and the ability to martial words into language, precede the enslavement of animals (literally, the Greek douleuô from doulos, ‘slave’) and the subsequent use of horses as ostentatious luxury. It is noteworthy that in this account humans are imagined as having once existed without gnômê or, arguably, logos: humans acquire language in the stage before they enslave and exploit animals, and although the word logos is not itself used, even a century before Aristotle it is understood that the acquisition of words and language is the final differentiation between men and beasts.⁴ The use of animals for prophecy and for sacrifice, which may be understood as standing pars pro toto for the practice of eating meat, can therefore be understood as the actions of ‘man with logos’. This sort of history, particularly the picture of men living in caves before the intervention of gods, clearly had wide currency in the Greek imagination: the Homeric Hymn to Hephaestus (20.3ff.) uses the same language of a ‘beast-like’ existence preceding man’s endowment with technical skills.

Writing a generation after Aeschylus, Protagoras of Adbera (c. 490–420 BC), the totemic subject of Tom Regan’s proposed inhumation quoted in the epigraph to the introduction above and the man who devised the so-called homo mensura,⁵ presented a view of the Prometheus myth which survives in a philosophical discussion documented by Plato. Protagoras was regarded as the first⁶ of the Greek intellectuals known as sophistai, who were renowned for using clever language and complex reasoning, and who performed with flair in semi-public discussions such as dinner parties as well as providing instruction for those in the public realm where oratory was paramount (and making a very good living out of it, as Diogenes Laertius records in Lives of the philosophers 9.52). Protagoras wrote and operated in the time of the Presocratics and was probably a generation older than Socrates: although none of his work survives intact, some records of titles suggest that the focus of his work is not as cosmological or zöogonic as, for example, Archelaus or Empedocles (below). His discussion in Plato’s dialogue is part of a larger argument on how mankind became acquainted with political skills: Protagoras begins his speech after asking his audience whether they would like to hear a story (mythos) or a reasoned argument (logos). They ask him to choose, so he settles on a mythos: this important distinction distances Protagoras from the details of the narrative; other fragments of Pratagoras’s writing display a deep ambivalence over whether or not the gods existed,⁷ which itself suggests that some Greeks did in fact believe the literal truth of these mythological creation stories.

2 Plato, Protagoras 320c–322b

‘Once there was a time when there were gods, but there was no race of mortals. And when the time came for mortals too to receive creation, the gods moulded them within the earth from a mixture of earth and fire and of such materials as are made from mixing fire and earth. When they were about to bring their creations into the light, they commanded Prometheus and Epimetheus to equip them and deal out their capacities as befitted them. Epimetheus begged of Prometheus that he himself might do the dealing out faculties: “and when I have done it”, he said, “you can look over it”. Persuading him thus, Epimetheus dealt out faculties: to some he bestowed bodily strength without swiftness, and the weaker ones he furnished with speed; to some he provided armour, while to those given an unarmed nature he devised some other capacity to bring themselves to safety. To those he held down with smallness of size, he allotted winged flight or dwelling-places under the earth; to those he greatly increased in size, he had them preserve themselves by this same largeness; and thus he dealt out everything else according to this balance. In constructing these matters he was careful that no race should be annihilated, and when he had so supplied them as to avoid mutual slaughter, he devised protection against the seasons ordered by Zeus, putting thick hair and hard skins around them sufficient to ward off winter and also burning heat, and so that when they went to their beds the same coverings could serve as a proper bed-spread for each species. For shoes he gave some hooves, and others fur with thick bloodless skin. Then he provided different sorts of food for each of them, for some the plants of the earth, for others the fruits of trees, for others roots. For the nourishment of some they had other animals as food, and so some animals he made less prolific while to those who were thus subject to destruction he attached greater fertility so that their races might be preserved.

‘Now Epimetheus being not especially wise, he unwittingly used up all of the capacities on the irrational animals (aloga, “without logos”); the race of men was left without any adornments, and Epimetheus did not know what to do. As he sat at a loss, Prometheus arrived to inspect the work and saw that all of the other animals were very well equipped with everything, whereas man was naked, unshod, without bedding and without armour.⁸ Already the appointed day had come on which man as well should go forth out of the earth into the light. Then Prometheus, being at a loss as to how to find some way to save mankind, stole from Hephaestus and Athena skills in the arts together with fire (for without fire no-one would be able to have or make use of the skills) and thus he gave the gifts to man. Although man then had the wisdom needed for being alive, he did not have civic skills: for these things belong to Zeus. Prometheus could not go further and enter the acropolis where Zeus dwelled, and Zeus’s guards were fearsome, but he entered undetected into the dwelling-place shared by Hephaestus and Athena in which they practiced their own skills and stole Hephaestus’s skills with fire, and Athena’s as well, as gifts for men. So this is how man acquired the faculties of living his life, but later Prometheus, because of Epimetheus (as they say), was to stand trial for theft.

‘Since man now had with him a share in divinity, in the first place because of the common origin of men and gods he was the only one of the animals to acknowl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Defining Animal: Ancient Writers on Animal Nature
• Part II  The Treatment of Animals in the Classical World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Passage Index of texts
• Subject Index