Exceptional animals in classical literature
THE TROJAN HORSE AND OTHER STORIES
Ten ancient creatures that make us human
JULIA KINDT
380pp. Cambridge University Press. £25 (US $34.99).
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN? This question much exercised ancient Greek philosophers, and their answers often focused on how we conceive of the relationship between humans and animals. According to Aristotle, humans are distinguished from animals because, while animals have voices that enable them to express pain and pleasure, humans alone have speech (logos). For him it is speech that allows us to be ethical and moral creatures, to work out right from wrong. Ta aloga (“those without reason”) became a synonym for “animals”. Later thinkers, including Plutarch and Porphyry, fiercely opposed this influential distinction, arguing that animals did have logos, and therefore a capacity for reason. But if we go beyond philosophy to storytelling, suggests Julia Kindt in her sparky and stimulating book for the general reader, we can uncover a richer understanding of how animals have been used to shape ideas of what it means to be human. The Trojan Horse and Other Stories gives us ten essays on ancient Greek and Roman animals, real and mythical. Some of these, such as the Minotaur and the Trojan Horse, may be familiar; others, like the Shearwaters of Diomedea (seabirds said by the Roman writer Aelian to be able to distinguish between Greeks and non-Greeks), less so.
In some ways its anthropocentrism makes this an old-fashioned book. Animal studies in general have moved on to “posthumanism”. Yet there is no engagement here with any of these important new theorizations of humanity and race. That said, the book’s structure allows Kindt to “think the human” from different perspectives, to excavate connections between the ancient and the modern, and to take the reader on fascinating cultural forays.
Xanthus, Achilles’ speaking horse in the Iliad, begins a long tradition of talking animals who challenge the idea of human exceptionalism, extending all the way to Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Remy in Pixar’s Ratatouille. But it is not only a question of speech. In the story of Androcles and the Lion, the fugitive slave Androcles comes across a lion in pain and helps him by removing a thorn in his paw. The lion is grateful to Androcles and, years later, when Androcles is recaptured and sentenced to death in the Roman arena, recognizes him and shows him affection instead of eating him. It’s a story that complicates the philosophical debate about the presence or absence of language and reason, and “encourages us to think of new aspects, such as the roles of empathy and loyalty, as additional dimensions in the ways humans and animals meet”. Hu
