Eloquent Alogia: Animal Narrators in Ancient Greek Literature (original) (raw)
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Those Who Cannot Speak. Animals as Others in Ancient Greek Thought
The essay is concerned with the topic of the difference between humans and animals in ancient Greek thought. Starting with the lexical problems in studying ancient terms indicating animals, the author presents various definitions of man formulated in contrast to animals, treated as inferior beings. She focuses on the term logos, understood both as reason and ability to speak, which the animals were deprived of according to most of Greek thinkers. The author shows also how the idea of man uniqueness has changed from the archaic period to the classical one. At the end of the essay several reasons why the ancient philosophers define man in opposition to animals are suggested.
The appearance of animals as dramatis personae (members of the Chorus or individual characters of the plot) was a common motif in Old Attic Comedy, traceable for a period of almost 150 years – from the early improvised popular spectacles in the last decades of the sixth century to the twilight of the genre after the end of the Peloponnesian War (Archippus’ Fishes, ca. 402; Aristophanes’ Storks, ca. 399). The speaking and anthropomorphic beasts were a distinctive component of the Attic Märchenkomödie, the type of play based on materials drawn from the world of fairy tale and the popular imaginary, which seems to have been the most pristine manifestation of the native Athenian comic spirit. Many comic dramas of this kind are only attested as titles. Nevertheless, the extant comedies of Aristophanes and a handful of fragments from the works of his contemporaries allow some insight into the dramatic use of personified beasts on the comic stage. A number of plot types and thematic patterns may be discerned in the known repertoire. The simplest form consisted in the amusing portrayal of the animals and their life in their natural habitat. The animal Choruses or characters were endowed with human voices and spoke or sang about their experiences. They may also have been humorously compared or assimilated to human types from contemporary society (e.g. avant-garde musicians or upper-class gourmets), but their anthropomorphism was not carried further; the animals were not shown performing properly human tasks. The Archaic plays depicted in a series of black-figure vase-paintings (ca. 540-480 BCE), as well as the pioneering productions of Magnes, which were characterised, according to Aristotle, by simple storylines and artless plots, must have belonged to this category. Aristophanes’ Frogs and perhaps Eupolis’ Goats represent sophisticated and poetically self-conscious revivals of this early form. In a more complex form of storyline, developed by the mature years of the fifth century, the animal characters were involved in typically human activities, sometimes indeed in civic duties and endeavours of civilised society, similarly to the beasts of the Aesopic fables. Also, like the personages of fable, the animals of comedy might symbolically represent anthropological types or attributes of the human psyche. The most emblematic example is the trial of the dogs in Aristophanes’ Wasps, in which the two litigating hounds stand for contemporary Athenian statesmen and their respective political attitudes. Aristophanes’ Storks was possibly another such case, if the storks of the title incarnated the ideal of filial piety, in contrast to the ungrateful son who was a character of the plot, in a play apparently preoccupied with the conflict of generations. A variant pattern is exemplified by the Chorus of the Wasps, stage hybrids of men endowed with waspish features, which represent graphically the central traits of their character (cf. also the Hoopoe of the Birds and perhaps Pherecrates’ Myrmekanthropoi). In the most elaborate kind of plot, the anthropomorphic beasts were combined with another capital theme of fairy-tale comedy: the creation of fantastic secondary worlds and utopian societies. The animal Choruses and heroes founded an imaginary state of their own and undertook its various civic operations and offices. This central mythopoeic structure might be enriched with further magical motifs, such as marvellous abundance of food (“Cockaigne”), animation of objects, or supernatural metamorphoses, so that the entire comic storyline resembled an anthology of fairy-tale materials. This form is represented by the greatest masterpieces of Attic animal comedy: Crates’ Beasts, Aristophanes’ Birds, and Archippus’ Fishes, three plays that are directly linked to one another in a chain of literary influence. Many thanks to my friend and great philologist Professor Piero Totaro for the invitation to give this paper. I dedicate it to the memory of the three scholars who have shed light, more than anyone, on the fantastic and fabulous nature of Old Comedy: Tadeusz Zielinski, Cedric Whitman, and our own Gregory Sifakis. Nothing of what I have written here would have been conceivable without their work.
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Although reasoned discourse on human-animal relations is often considered a late twentieth-century phenomenon, ethical debate over animals and how humans should treat them can be traced back to the philosophers and literati of the classical world. From Stoic assertions that humans owe nothing to animals that are intellectually foreign to them, to Plutarch's impassioned arguments for animals as sentient and rational beings, it is clear that modern debate owes much to Greco-Roman thought.
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This article focuses on the concept 'reconstruction of the world' proposed by G. Zoran in his theoretical work on the representation of space in narrative. It makes special reference to the inter-medially transformative processes that narrators and audiences undergo, as materially concrete objects in space turn into representations in the verbal medium. Investigating the possible bodies of knowledge common to the participants in the communicative process, the article specifically discusses animals widely described in late antique and medieval Jewish folk tales and considers the possibilities for reconstructing the sources of shared imaginary worlds.
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This contribution examines Philo of Alexandria's De animalibus, paying particular attention to its dialogic format and considering it within the broader context of the development of the genre of the dialogue in antiquity. It argues that as an early imperial-period text, composed probably around 50 CE, De animalibus is of considerable importance to our understanding of transformations in ancient dialogue in the post-classical period.
Dumb Animals: A Short History of Classical Logocentrism, Vichiana 58.1 (2021), 81-97
Among the most common and influential stereotypes of Greco-Roman literature is the idea that animals are ‘dumb’ (ἄλογα/muta), that is, mute and devoid of reason. In recent years, several explorations of what Stephen Newmyer has aptly called the ‘man alone of animals’ topos have pointed out that in asserting the privileged status of humans the ancients attached special importance to articulate language. Yet, most of these explorations have adopted a thematic rather than historical approach in an attempt to provide a comparative assessment of ancient and modern paradigms. In the present paper, I follow a historical line through the literary representations of animals as ‘dumb’, focusing on two especially crucial moments: the rise of classical and Hellenistic stereotypes, and the Roman appropriation of Greek thought. A detailed account of the evolution of the idea of animal ‘dumbness’ is beyond the scope of this paper, but an overview of some of the most significant stages in the history of classical ‘logocentrism’ can refine our perception of codes, strategies, and devices which are currently being used in the world around us. N.B. This is the final draft of the above-cited article. Please refer to the published version for the correct page numbers.