Gordon Lindsay Campbell - The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life

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ISBN 9780199589425

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eISBN 9780191035166

THIS volume is the product of a suggestion made to me by Hilary OShea, Senior Editor for Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology at Oxford University Press. I am very grateful to her for her advice, to Taryn Das Neves, Annie Rose, and to all of the staff at OUP for their kind help and to Grinne Byrne for her help with editing the chapters. I am also very grateful to all of the authors who have contributed to this volume, and apologize to them for the delay in publication. I would like to single out for praise here Liliane Bodson, author of the chapter on ancient zoological knowledge, for her heroic perseverance in the face of severe ill health. I am extremely grateful to her for the excellent chapter that she produced under very difficult conditions.

GORDON LINDSAY CAMPBELL

JEREMY B. LEFKOWITZ

ALASTAIR HARDEN

BABETTE PTZ

LAURA HAWTREE

CHIARA THUMIGER

TIMOTHY HOWE

GEOFFREY KRON

TIMOTHY HOWE

MICHAEL MACKINNON

RORY EGAN

GEOFFREY KRON

MICHAEL MACKINNON

THORSTEN FGEN

GORDON LINDSAY CAMPBELL

JEREMY MCINERNEY

MICHAEL MACKINNON

ADRIENNE MAYOR

DANIEL OGDEN

PETER STRUCK

GUNNEL EKROTH

INGVILD SAELID GILHUS

EMMA ASTON

CHIARA THUMIGER

MARY BEAGON

ANGELA MCDONALD

JO-ANN SHELTON

SINCLAIR BELL AND CAROLYN WILLEKES

IDA STENBERG

STEPHEN T. NEWMYER

DANIEL A. DOMBROWSKI

LILIANE BODSON

ADRIENNE MAYOR

VERONIKA GOEBEL AND JORIS PETERS

Emma Aston University of Reading

Mary Beagon University of Manchester

Sinclair Bell Northern Illinois University

Liliane Bodson University of Lige

Gordon Lindsay Campbell National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Daniel A. Dombrowski Seattle University

Rory Egan University of Manitoba

Gunnel Ekroth Uppsala University

Thorsten Fgen Durham University

Ingvild Saelid Gilhus University of Bergen

Veronika Goebel Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich

Alastair Harden University of Oxford

Laura Hawtree University of Exeter

Timothy Howe St Olaf College

Geoffrey Kron University of Victoria, British Columbia

Jeremy B. Lefkowitz Swarthmore College

Michael MacKinnon University of Winnipeg

Adrienne Mayor Stanford University

Angela McDonald University of Glasgow

Jeremy McInerney University of Pennsylvania

Stephen T. Newmyer Duquesne University

Daniel Ogden University of Exeter

Ida stenberg University of Gothenburg

Joris Peters Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich

Babette Ptz Victoria University of Wellington

Jo-Ann Shelton University of California Santa Barbara

Peter Struck University of Pennsylvania

Chiara Thumiger Humboldt Universitt zu Berlin

Carolyn Willekes University of Calgary

GORDON LINDSAY CAMPBELL

THERE has been quite a surge in recent years in interest in animals in antiquity, and this volume is intended to present a broad survey of attitudes to animals in the classical world by some of the leading contemporary scholars. Each chapter can stand alone as a starting point for investigation into each topic, and each has a useful section on suggested reading for further investigation, but the book may also be read as a whole as a coherent commentary on the whole field of scholarship. The main pre-existing volumes, the Berg Cultural History of Animals () are also very well worth consulting, and may offer in some cases a more theoretical approach than I offer here.

Before I started editing this volume my main interest was in literary and philosophical animals in the ancient world, but, encouraged by the anonymous readers for OUP and my editors, I have broadened out the book to include the realities of animals in the ancient world, and this I hope has provided a much broader and more balanced spread of chapter topics.

Animals are good to think with, and ancient treatments of animals, whether in art, literature, or philosophy, often generate more questions than answers. For example, the question are we animals? can be answered in many ways. Most ancient writers who try to answer this definitively say that we are indeed animals, but animals with special attributes that enabled us to separate ourselves from animalkind and develop the language, culture, and technology that make us human. Other writers may agree that we are animals, but warn that we are in danger of backsliding into a bestial state if we fail to continue to practise the culture that originally made us human. The Arcadians in particular are always in danger of turning into wolves if they will insist on carrying on eating people ().

If the Centaurs display the extremes of inhuman bestiality, there is also a strong tradition in the ancient world of the superiority of animals to humans. Democritus says that we are foolish to imagine that we are superior to animals since they have been our teachers in many arts: the spider in weaving, the swallow in house-building, and the swan in singing (DK68 B154). Similarly Lucretius says that we should not think this world was made for us; if it was made for anyone it was for the animals since they are so much better adapted to it than we are (