Interactions between Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

507 Pages·2017·6.343 MB·English

by  Thorsten Fögen, Edmund Thomas

Interactions between Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

Interactions between
Animals and Humans
in Graeco-Roman

Antiquity

||

Edited by Thorsten Fögen and Edmund Thomas
ISBN 978-3-11-054416-9
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-054562-3
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-054451-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Cover image: Attic red-figure cup, c. 525–475 B.C.; New York, ex-Hirschmann Collection G64
(© Sotheby’s, London)
Data conversion: jürgen ullrich typosatz, 86720 Nördlingen
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
♾ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany

www.degruyter.com
Preface | V
Preface
Preface Preface
This volume goes back to a series of guest lectures given in the context of the
departmental research seminar (running from January until May 2015) and to a
conference held at Durham University (20‒21 June 2015). Claudia Beier, Kenneth
Kitchell, Jeremy McInerney, and Stephen T. Newmyer, who were unable to at-
tend the guest lecture series or the conference, were kind enough to send us
their articles for this collection.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the generous financial support provided by
Durham University and the Institute of Classical Studies London for the organi-
sation of the guest lecture series and the conference. In addition, we would like
to thank Katharina Legutke and her team at De Gruyter for accepting this book
into their programme and for their efficient support; Katja Brockmann deserves
special recognition for her hard work on the final production of the volume.
Thorsten Fögen would like express his deep gratitude to the Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), where he held a Senior Research Fellow-
ship during the academic year of 2015/16 and carried out most of the editorial
work for this volume. Special thanks are due to the NIAS librarians, Dindy van
Maanen and Erwin Nolet, but also to the other members of the wonderful NIAS
team.
Edmund Thomas is extremely grateful to the British School at Rome for the
award of the Balsdon Fellowship for 2015/16, which allowed him to carry out the
final stages of editing from April to June 2016.

Thorsten Fögen & Edmund Thomas

June 2016
VI | Preface
Table of Contents | VII
Table of Contents
Table of Contents Table of Contents

Thorsten Fögen & Edmund Thomas
Introduction | 1

Sian Lewis
A lifetime together? Temporal perspectives on animal-human
interactions | 19

Cristiana Franco
Greek and Latin words for human-animal bonds: Metaphors and
taboos | 39

Louise Calder
Pet and image in the Greek world: The use of domesticated animals in
human interaction | 61

Thorsten Fögen
Lives in interaction: Animal ‘biographies’ in Graeco-Roman literature? | 89

Gillian Clark
Philosophers’ pets: Porphyry’s partridge and Augustine’s dog | 139

Arnaud Zucker
Psychological, cognitive and philosophical aspects of animal ‘envy’ towards
humans in Theophrastus and beyond | 159

Kenneth F. Kitchell
“Animal literacy” and the Greeks: Philoctetes the hedgehog and Dolon
the weasel | 183

Sarah Miles
Cultured animals and wild humans? Talking with the animals in Aristophanes’
Wasps | 205

Stephen T. Newmyer
Human-animal interactions in Plutarch as commentary on human moral
failings | 233
VIII | Table of Contents
Jeremy McInerney
Fish or man, Babylonian or Greek? Oannes between cultures | 253

Claudia Beier
Fighting animals: An analysis of the intersections between human self and
animal otherness on Attic vases | 275

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Keeping and displaying royal tribute animals in Ancient Persia and the
Near East | 305

Edmund Thomas
Urban geographies of human-animal relations in classical antiquity | 339

Alastair Harden
‘Wild men’ and animal skins in Archaic Greek imagery | 369

John Wilkins
Galen on the relationship between human beings and fish | 389

Marco Vespa
Why avoid a monkey: The refusal of interaction in Galen’s Epideixis | 409

Thorsten Fögen
Animals in Graeco-Roman antiquity: A select bibliography | 435

Contributors | 475

Indices
Index rerum | 479
Index animalium | 483
Index nominum (personarum sive animalium) | 486
Index locorum | 489
Interactions beetween Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity | 1
Thorsten Fögen & Edmund Thomas
Interactions between Animals and
Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity:
Introduction
Thorsten Fögen & Edmund Thomas Interactions beetween Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

“To dear Peter, most faithful of friends and
dearest of companions, a dog in a thousand”

Agatha Christie, Dumb Witness (dedication)

“In der Geschichte ist viel zu wenig von
Tieren die Rede.”

Elias Canetti (1943), quoted from Über Tiere
(München & Wien 2002, 13)

To introduce this volume, several randomly selected textual excerpts may help
to illustrate different types of interaction between animals and humans both in
the ancient and in the modern world.
The first snippet comes from the Geoponica, the Byzantine compilation of
agricultural lore in twenty books, assembled in the tenth century A.D. for the
emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.1 In addition to astronomy, a calendar
of the farmer’s duties, viticulture, the making of oil and horticulture, a large
part of this collection (Books 13‒20) focuses on the significance of animals in
the context of agriculture. The excerpt in question is taken from Book 13 (Geop.
13.9.5; ed. Heinrich Beckh, Leipzig 1895; our translation):

DOI 10.1515/9783110545623-001
Ἀπουλήϊος δέ φησι τὸν πληγέντα ὑπὸ σκορπίου ὑπὲρ ὄνου καθίσαι πρὸς τὴν οὐρὰν
ἐστραμμένον, καὶ τὸν ὄνον ἀλγεῖν ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ καὶ πέρδεσθαι.

“Apuleius says that anyone who is stung by a scorpion should sit on a donkey, facing
backwards towards its tail, and that this transfers the pain to the donkey and makes it
fart.”

_____

1 On the Geoponica, see now Dalby (2011).
DOI 10.1515/9783110545623-001