Human and Animal in Ancient Greece

Empathy and Encounter in Classical Literature

Tua Korhonen, Erika Ruonakoski

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784537616
• eBook ISBN: 9781786721198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Literature

Animals were omnipresent in the everyday life and the visual arts of classical Greece. In literature, too, they had significant functions.This book discusses the role of animals - both domestic and wild - and mythological hybrid creatures in ancient Greek literature. Challenging the traditional view of the Greek anthropocentrism, the authors provide a nuanced interpretation of the classical relationship to animals. Through a close textual analysis, they highlight the emergence of the perspective of animals in Greek literature. Central to the book's enquiry is the question of empathy: investigating the ways in which ancient Greek authors invited their readers to empathise with non-human counterparts. The book presents case studies on the animal similes in the Iliad, the addresses to animals and nature in Sophocles' Philoctetes, the human-bird hybrids in The Birds by Aristophanes and the animal protagonists of Anyte's epigrams. Throughout, the authors develop an innovative methodology that combines philological and historical analysis with a philosophy of embodiment, or phenomenology of the body.
Shedding new light on how animals were regarded in ancient Greek society, the book will be of interest to classicists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars and all those studying empathy and the human-animal relationship.

PART I

READING ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE THROUGH PHENOMENOLOGY

This section of the book discusses the meaning and implications of phenomenology of the body for studying animal figures in ancient Greek literature. The analysis begins with the following questions: In which ways can ancient literary texts elucidate the human-animal relationship of their time? What is the role of the modern reader in the process of interpretation? It is suggested that although historical and philological analyses help us understand the context and intricacies of Graeco-Roman literary texts, a phenomenological discussion of embodiment, empathy and communication in and through those texts further elucidates their dynamics.¹ Literature turns out to be a powerful vehicle for empathy: a literary text opens up not just one but several points of view on its world and reveals alien consciousnesses to us as if from the inside.

Relating to the Animal Other in Different Times: What Can Be Said?

When read today ancient Graeco-Roman literature appears ancient and new at the same time: it bears traces of ancient times and yet lives in the present as if it were written yesterday. In it encounters with non-human animals are described in such recognisable ways that one may be tempted to adopt the view that, despite some differences, many aspects of the human-animal relationship remain the same throughout millennia. Yet it can be asked with good reason whether the reading experience reveals anything about the experience of the author or about the audience of the time and their culture.

Numerous aspects certainly make it difficult for us to approach the alien experience that is supposedly behind ancient Greek literature. First of all, no foreign experience as such can be accessed directly. One cannot, strictly speaking, experience the experience of others, even though we do see traces of the experience of others in their behaviour.² Likewise, we do not access any foreign experience as such through the reading experience. Instead, we enter a literary apparatus that guides but does not totally control our way of experiencing. Readers always bring their history to the reading experience. For this reason, a piece of literature becomes alive anew and assumes different meanings each time it is read.³

This is true for the reading experiences of all fictive texts, of course, but there are also specific barriers between the modern reader and ancient Greek authors. Differences in text editions make up only one of the many problems pertaining to textual criticism, and many of the allusions concerning political and cultural currents of the writer's time may remain unknown even to the enlightened reader. Furthermore, our way of receiving text is somewhat different: for us quiet reading is the norm, whereas in ancient Greece the reception of literary texts appears to have been, to a large extent, auditive.⁴ This may make it difficult for us to appreciate, for example, the phonic and rhythmic elements of Greek poetry. We may also be led to attribute the inherent intimacy of quiet reading too easily to the reception of the texts by the authors’ contemporaries.⁵

Nevertheless, the experience of contact and communication remains present in the act of reading. Wolfgang Iser distinguishes two ways in which a literary text allows us to relate to a sociohistorical context. First, it allows us to see that which is present in our everyday life but to which we do not pay attention, and second, it helps us grasp realities that were never our own. According to him, this happens through a recodification or a kind of transformation that takes place in the text. In the case of an ancient text, the norms of the writer's age have, according to Iser, faded into past history, and the reader is no longer entangled in the system from which they arose. The reader can in fact reconstruct the historical situation that provided the framework for the text by means of recodification.⁶

Whether or not relating to the historical framework of the text can happen this schematically is open to question. Particularly if we think about poetry, so many gaps are left in poetic descriptions that it would be rather demanding to reconstruct a historical situation on their basis. However, there is some truth in Iser's claim: the different historical situation does become somehow graspable in the act of reading. This is not merely due to the so-called historical facts mediated by the text. The text provides a point of view on a situation, one different from our own, as well as a way of reacting and seeing the world that differs from ours at least in some ways. We get to occupy that point of view and willingly become absorbed in that alien world instead of keeping a critical distance to it, as might be the case when we read a set of arguments. It is as if we experienced the other's experience or thought his or her thoughts, even though we do remain aware of our life and situation as the primary ones for us.

It can still be asked, however, what exactly in the reading experience reveals temporal distance to us. As is evident when reading Anyte's epigram about a goat and children (AP 6.312), an ancient text may include numerous references to a reality foreign to us:

Ἡνία δή τoι παῖδες ἐνί, τράγε, φoινικόεντα
θέντες καὶ λασίῳ φιμὰ περὶ στόματι,
ἵππια παιδεύoυσι θεoῦ περὶ ναὸν ἄεθλα,
ὄφρ᾽ αὐτoὺς φoρέης ἤπια τερπoμένoυς.
(AP 6.312=Geogh. 13)

Putting red reins on you, goat, with a noseband
round your shaggy mouth, the children train you
in horse contests around the god's temple
so long as you bear them gently to their delight.⁷

A layperson reading this epigram may have only a vague idea about what, for instance, the ‘god's temple’ might be like, and about whether the poem is indicative of cruelty to animals, humorous, or both. A classical scholar might be able to contextualise the poem, pointing out the position of Anyte as an Arcadian epigrammatist and female poet of the third century BCE and her merits as the possible inventor of two subgenres of the epigram (the pastoral epigram and the animal epigram), or suggesting that the epigram may describe a scene portrayed in a votive painting or relief.⁸ These pieces of information emphasise our historical and cultural distance to the text, however, and most certainly do not eliminate its fundamental indeterminacy.

On the other hand, ancient Greek texts often make us face the taboos of our own time, presenting different sets of rules for decency, attitudes to children and gender, social hierarchies, ways of relating to animals, to death, and so on. There is a constant interplay of intimacy and recognition on the one hand, and an astonishing foreignness on the other. Not only do these texts communicate to us certain kinds of relationships to non-human animals, they put us in the position where we can, in a way, relive those relationships. However, when we do this, we never completely lose ourselves in the text or appropriate an alien way of experiencing. A distance remains within the intimacy of the reading experience.

If we scrutinise the possibly universal, transhistorical features of the relationship between humans and non-human animals, the question of embodiment appears as central. There is a particular relationship between different kinds of animal bodies and ourselves, for we relate to the movements of non-human animals through the norm of human embodiment, allowing ourselves to be drawn into those movements while maintaining an experience of distance and difference.

Of course, not even all human bodies are exactly the same. There are female bodies, male bodies, intersex bodies, bodies of different skin colour, different sizes and different styles of moving, children's bodies, handicapped bodies, energetic bodies and sick bodies, to mention just a few variations. Yet there is also a very general, common point of departure for humans that includes, among other things, the following: typically human and as such norm-creating sensual, social and linguistic abilities and a body that is lived as both resembling other animal bodies and yet different from them.

For this reason, figures of non-human animals are not understood in a totally arbitrary way, should they appear as one of the characters or as metaphors in the text – there are features in the human-animal relationship that acquire their transhistoricity from the embodied condition of humans and non-human animals. Animal metaphors offer the sensuous and bodily characteristics of that particular animal to the reader to empathise with, and for that reason are never merely symbolic. In fact, the power of the metaphor comes, to a great degree, through exactly that sensuous-empathetic possibility.

Nevertheless, a literary animal figure does not represent an animal in the sense of giving us a copy of the animal. Instead, it makes present the network of meanings related to that particular animal.⁹ Depending on the reader, different embodied meanings pertaining to the animal's sensuous characteristics become activated in the reading experience. Certainly, some of the meanings may be lost along the way, when we deal with an ancient epic, play or poem. It becomes the task of the scholar to retrieve some of those lost meanings, such as the status value of horses or the importance of goats in the religious life of ancient Greece.

The bodily relationship to a goat is, as long as the word refers to a certain kind of animal,¹⁰ at the same time universal and individually and historically differentiated. This animal is different from humans in that most of us have hands while it has cloven hooves and it is covered with fur while we have hair only here and there. In addition, the goat's way of moving differs from ours, as it is much more agile than we are. Yet some of us may resemble the goat more than most of us in their way of moving, or by the structure of their bearded faces, and some of us may feel akin to the goat even though others do not. Our human bodies enable certain kinds of relationships to goats, and yet these relationships are also lived in an individually differentiated historical situation and are coloured by this situation.¹¹

Therefore, it would be absurd to claim that a particular Greek woman who lived in the third century BCE would have encountered goats in exactly the same way as, say, a particular man in our time: their common features, such as being two-legged and having the capacities of speech and imagination, and as such being able to have certain kinds of relationships with these animals, carry with them sediments that have to do with their bodily, social, cultural and psychological differences. In other words, to understand the poem in a context wider than our own limited sociohistorical viewpoint, it is necessary to chart numerous historical variables, and, along with them, questions pertaining to literary expression in Anyte's time.

From the phenomenological perspective, however, ancient literature cannot and should not be read merely as a collection of philological dilemmas but as a vehicle for communication through the ages, a contact point between long-deceased authors and ourselves. For this reason it is useful to examine the questions of embodiment and empathy in more detail.

Situated Bodies

In order to gain a clear conception of the role of embodiment in literature, it is necessary to compare the reading experience to everyday experience. To this end, the situation described in Anyte's goat poem is discussed first from the premise that it takes place in everyday life. A problem arises, however, as soon as one tries to imagine the situation as real: from which viewpoint does the situation at hand appear to us? In everyday encounters one viewpoint is the most fundamental: one's own. As long as our bodies exist as living bodies, and as long as we are in full possession of our mental capacities, they will constitute for us the primary, fundamental viewpoint or perspective on the world.

In literature, however, the viewpoint can easily wander from one character to another. In this case we can choose between the viewpoints of the narrator, the goat or even the children. For the sake of convenience, we shall assume the viewpoint of the narrator, and along with it, the body of a human being. This done, we can forget for a moment that the situation we are discussing comes from an epigram, allowing ourselves to extend our description beyond what is given in the epigram, if needed. At this point the goal is not to interpret the poem but to describe embodiment with the help of the situation given in the poem.

What is it, then, to be an embodied being? Through my body, I have a spatial location in the world, a point from which I perceive what I perceive. Edmund Husserl also calls one's own body, the living body, the zero-point of orientation to the world.¹² Thanks to this zero-point, inanimate things as well as other bodies appear to me as located in the world and in relation to myself: on my left, on my right, behind me, above me, and so on.¹³ For instance, I perceive the goat and the children right in front of me, and the earth below my feet appears as the ground to which I have a distinct relationship: this ground does not move but rather things upon it appear to move, and I myself normally have my feet on the ground and head up rather than vice versa.¹⁴

I do not perceive things from a disembodied perspective, and it is impossible for me to imagine a perceptible world without imagining it from a perspective, and, by implication, a spatial location. My senses are bodily senses, and I cannot imagine a world that would not be seen, heard, touched or tasted, that is, one given to me through my senses and therefore through my body, because even my imagination operates through what is first given to me sensually. My immediate surroundings are given to me through my senses: I feel the warmth of the sun on my skin, I see the temple in its brilliant colours, I smell the sacrificial animals and their droppings, I hear the children's voices as well as the sounds the goat makes, and I experience the position of my own body in relation to the rest of the world. I am here, now, and while the surrounding world envelops me, I am also the perceiver of this world.¹⁵

Indeed, my body is oriented towards the world; it is intentional. For Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, movement is the originary form of embodied intentionality, and it implies an ability to function in the world: the intentionality of the body appears to me in the mode of ‘I can’ (ich kann).¹⁶ I can walk towards the temple or away from it, I can grab a hold of the reins the children are adjusting on the goat, I can form words with my mouth and address others by them. I am not merely a witness to the scene but an agent who is able to reach out and become an active participant in the events.

As can be seen, descriptions of bodily existence require resorting to the first person. Even if one's way of apprehending the world has cultural sediments in it and therefore traces from others, the first-person perspective is called for when we deal with embodied experience or discuss the question of consciousness. According to the basic phenomenological insight, viewing the body and the mind as two separate substances is an error, and consciousness can be accounted for only in its intertwining with the body. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘I am my body’.¹⁷ According to him, consciousness is being towards things through the body.¹⁸ Hence he links consciousness with general directedness towards the world or ‘operative intentionality’.¹⁹

The body does have object-like characteristics, yet it is never merely an object. My body is situated in the world as all perceived things are, but it is also a centre of experience and action. I perceive with my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my ears, my hands, and so on, and therefore my relationship to my body is particular and immediate. On the other hand, I cannot perceive my own body completely. I cannot obtain a full view of my back or of my side without an aid, such as multiple mirrors or a camera, nor can I see my brains or lungs without technical equipment. Even though I can direct my attention to my body at will, to reflect, for instance, upon my sensations or the position of my body, and even though some part of the body may call for my attention through sensations of pain, pleasure, numbness and so on, most of the time my body remains at the margins of my perception.

I, as a witness of the scene in which a group of children harness a goat as a pretence, am not pure matter or pure spirit, but a body-subject, ma...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Reading Ancient Greek Literature through Phenomenology
• 2. Encounters with Animals in Greek Literature
• 3. The Spectrum of Human-Animal Relationships in Greek Antiquity
• 4. Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography