When Animals were not quite so
Other:
Homer’s Beast Similes and Hesiod’s
Bird Signals*
January,
2007
The
ancient Greeks certainly claimed to believe that they were different from
animals, but how seriously are we to take this assertion? John Heath has now
highlighted their citation of the faculty of speech in particular as a differentium (Heath 2005); yet that criterion seems
problematic in that some beings perceived as Other actually had speech. He
notes that, among other examples (slaves, foreigners), women could speak, if
they were not supposed to do so much. Even more to the point, at times such an
assertion of human-animal difference will convey a tone of desperation,
suggesting fear that Greek citizens after all were not so different from their
more hir-sute fellow earthlings. Thus after some gods have given the horse
Xanthus the ability to relay a message to its master Achilles, and after it has
done so, no less than the Furies are invoked to silence it (Homer, Iliad
19.404-18). The epic surely sees the equine’s speech as “a threat to the
ordinances of nature,” as Heath says, given so drastic a step.
I believe that animals were felt to be
closer than is generally acknowledged, in particular by the Greeks of the
Archaic period (c. 750-500 B.C.E.), as opposed to the Classical period (c.
500-322 B.C.E.) when the Greek culture most familiar today
flourished. We readily understand that when, say, the 5th
century lyric poet Bacchylides called himself a
nightingale, the citation was simply an ornamental trope; still, I hold that
that was not true of earlier usage, when what we call “Classical culture” had
not yet jelled. Three of the earlier time’s notable texts will supply a general
orientation for the argument.
First, that favorite ogre of the Homerist, Polyphemus the Cyclops,
wishes that he could communicate directly with his favorite sheep (Homer, Odyssey
9.456-57). For Heath, the savage’s desire in this segment and his cannibalism
elsewhere show that he does not recognize the human-animal difference. Or as
another critic puts it, the sentiment indicates that Polyphemus
is nostalgic for a time when humans, animals, and gods were thought to have
lived as one, speaking one language (Gera 2003). In either reading his
portrayal as ostensibly human is nonetheless underlain by a sense that he is
rather close to the animals.
Second, the poem ascribed to
“Hesiod” called Works and Days, composed in the same general time period
as the Homeric epics, says that Zeus made humans different from the animals who
feed upon one another. Namely, humans have the faculty of justice (vv. 276-79).
The sentiment is rightly considered the first statement of such a principle in
the abstract. Still, the better interpretations of this part of the poem
recognize the thought as Hesiod’s rejoinder to a so-called fable cited earlier
in the work. A hawk standing had stressed a “might is right” principle in
speaking to a nightingale in its clutches (202-12), but the poet says it need
not be so in the later segment. The hawk and nightingale are often related
society’s rulers and Hesiod, respectively, but however that may be, the overall
section suggests a milieu where humanity is in danger of backsliding to the
hawk’s ethos.
Third, in the mid 6th
century B.C.E. the conventionally termed philosopher Anaximander of
The suggestion is thus that the
archaic Greeks felt human-animal differentia to be marginal. They thought of
themselves as suffering separation from the gods, on the one hand, and from the
animals, on the other, but they also believed that all had formerly lived as
one, in a “Golden Age” featuring a measure of harmony if also cannibalism
(Vidal-Naquet 2001). Thus they sensed commonality as
something that at least had once been possible. In passing, it has been noted
that Aesop’s animal fables, of which at least some stem from the Archaic
period, often make their points about human society with actions by characters
seemingly furthest from human: insects (Charpentier
and Vilatte 2001). Perhaps such distancing was a way
to give the point of the fable a clearer sense of abstraction by the contrast.
That would avoid confusion with any quasi-realist allegory that might suggest
itself when creatures closer to humans are used as exempla.
To get to specifics, the well known
Homeric simile often compares warriors with fierce animals, especially the
lion. As a striking example, the warrior who would later be Vergil’s
protagonist, Aeneas, was bearing down on Homer’s own, Achilles; but then the
tables turned, for
…
the son of Peleus rose like
a lion against him,
the
baleful beast, when men have been straining to kill him, the county
all in
the hunt, and he at the first pays them no attention
but
goes his own way, only when some one of the impetuous young men
has
hit him with the spear he whirls, jaws open, over his teeth foam
breaks
out, and in the depth of his chest the powerful heart groans;
he
lashes his own ribs with his tail and the flanks on both sides
as he
rouses himself to fury for the fight, eyes glaring,
and
hurls himself straight onward on the chance of killing some one
of
the men, or else being killed himself in the first onrush.
So
the proud heart and fighting fury stirred on Achilleus
to go
forward in the face of great-hearted Aineias,
(Homer,
Iliad 20.164-75, transl. Lattimore)
whereupon
Achilles would have killed Aeneas had not some gods intervened to save him.
This highly expressive form surely
deserves the vast critical literature it has inspired in classical philology
proper (for a review of which see Edwards 1991 24-41). Yet there has also been
substantial reference to it from beyond that sphere. Thus a professor at a
military institution notes where Homer compares heroes protecting the corpse of
the key character Patroclus with a lion protecting its young (Iliad
17.132-39). She says that “such similes, likening the warriors to ferociously
protective animals, reveal the drive to possess the body of a fallen comrade as
primal and potentially irresistible,” and that the drive comes down to us
today, honored in such productions as the film Saving Private Ryan (Samet 2005). Or, a professor at a medical school aptly
observes that Homer’s vanquisher is generally like a lion or a boar; his vanquished, a tree (Hawkins 1998).
Such observations recall one
conventionally philological argument: Michael Clarke challenges a prominent
strain of scholarship on Homer’s similes whereby they are simply understood as
tropes that serve a decorative role. Rather, he argues, the text sees a close
identification, in particular between Achilles and the lion. For example, in
one place where “Achilles likens himself to a lion, he
is revelling not only in being a hero but in being a
madman” (Clarke 1995). In response to this stimulating thesis, Heath in
particular grants Clarke’s point that excessive violence forms “the fatal flaw
shared by beasts and heroes,” that is, by means of its possibility of
self-destruction (Heath 2005). He then argues that in the poem’s final
Achilles-lion comparison the hero’s reversion to animalism is intimately
associated with his failure to be persuasive in words. That is to say, I take it, it is a matter of crossing back over that linguistic
dividing line.
But if the line was as easy to cross
as Achilles “bounding away like a lion” after the Trojan king has misunderstood
him (Iliad 24.572), the archaic Greeks must have felt pretty close to
the animals after all. Or, in terms of the tension between formalist and
Romantic aesthetics, now highlighted by Susan McHugh for modern literature
about human-animal relations (McHugh 2006), the Romantic pole is closer to the
Homeric view of the characters, at least, whatever the epic’s author(s?) may
have sensed was involved in his/their own relation to animals. Similarly, it
has been argued that “at a mythological level” there is a fusion between the
leading Greek hero Heracles (Hercules), who kills the Nemean
lion as the first of his famous labors, and the lion itself (Schnapp-Gourbeillon 1998).
Here an important issue is whether
the lion references are exotic or mundane. It has been held that after the
Bronze Age there were no longer lions in ancient Greece, nor in Asia Minor where
the Homeric poems arose, but Steven Lonsdale argues well that there will still
have been lions in Archaic times after all (Lonsdale 1990). (And the most
recent archaeological evidence includes one or possibly two lion bones of Archaic date; see Yannouli 2003.)
Thus the simile evidently intends an intimate association with everyday events
in the animal world, not rarities.
So far I have been treating the
violent side of the human-animal relation, the cannibalistic pole of the two
residua of the Golden Age. (And as the principal Trojan hero Hector dies,
Achilles does say that he wishes he had the spirit to eat the man’s flesh raw, Iliad
22.346-47.) Does the archaic Greek evidence show any less brutish affinity?
In passing, Jacques Dumont indeed
believes that the Odyssey if not the Iliad shows a love of
animals (Dumont 2001). For example, after the swineherd Eumaeus
had heard the tales of his guest (not knowing that the latter was his master
Odysseus in disguise), and had provided him with a comfortable bed when the
hour grew late, he himself declined to leave his particular animals. Rather, he
…
slung his sharp sword on his heavy shoulders,
and
put a very thick mantle about him, to keep the wind out,
and
took up also the hairy skin of a great, well-conditioned
goat,
and took up a sharp javelin as a protection
against
men and dogs, and went to sleep where his pigs, with shining
teeth,
lay in the hollow of a rock, sheltered from the North Wind.
(Homer,
Odyssey 14.528-33, transl. Lattimore)
In this
engaging glimpse of one human’s relation to animals and other aspects of nature
the goat represents utility; the dog, danger, but at least for
Still, some will say that that
closeness is only to the economic interests Eumaeus
serves; it may be that this passage says little,
But many scholars
writing on the latter part of the poem dissent. They hold that after
Hesiod has expressed his view of the injustices of society, and is at last
alone with his household, his tools, his work animals, his physical surroundings,
and his gods, one finds poetry of interest for its symbolism (e.g., Ballabriga 1981), for its dramatic unfolding (S. Nelson
1998), or for its use of figurative expression (Rosen 1990, Marsilio 2000),
among other points. (The later supersitions
also play roles; Hamilton 1989, Lardinois 1998). In
particular, this material features the calls of certain birds, which thus may
connote more than has been granted by those who dismiss Hesiod as a poet.
Here I come back to the issue of
speech. When philosophers like Plato or scholars like Heath write about speech
or language, they generally mean the production of words per se, that is,
prose. It is tacit that anything like tonal inflection is irrelevant. But what
if the proper topic is not prose, but poetry, or even song?
There is some reason to believe
that, historically, music either preceded language or developed in tandem with
it (Levman 1992, Mithen
2006). If the former, then the residue of original metrical chant is poetry,
and the residue of poetry is what we now call ordinary speech. Indeed, the
early Greek poets are known to have sung their performances, while
accompanying themselves with a stringed instrument. Some languages,
notably Chinese, even retain tone as integral to vocabulary. A parallel
consideration is that according to one body of opinion some animals, songbirds
and certain whales, create articulations that are too
complex to be relegated to the category of utilitarian signals, so that they
constitute what one can call music. (Gray et al. 2001
summarize a relevant symposium.) In theoretical terms, François-Bernard Mâche would classify human and animal music on the
basis of aesthetic criteria alone. Namely, he says, granted that given
preferred tonal or rhythmic patterns accrue to given species, all nonetheless
derive from a principle of “hypertelia:” art arises
as creation beyond what nature requires (Mâche
2000). To be sure, there is skepticism in particular of songbirds’ ability to
improvise (Slater 2000).
With all this in mind, consider a
key segment of Hesiod’s agricultural “details:”
Listen
up when you hear the voice of the crane,
the
yearly screeching from way up in the clouds.
This
carries a sign for plowing; to the season of winter
the
rainy it points; and it bites the heart of the man without cattle.
Then’s
the time to fatten up your curved-horned oxen, safely indoors.
For
easy it is, to say the words “lend me two oxen and a wagon.”
And
easy it is, turning you down flat, “there is already work for my oxen.”
Or
a man thinks, his head full of riches, he’ll build himself a wagon.
The
baby, he does not know this: there are a hundred pieces in a wagon.
First
take care to make them your mind’s property.
(Hesiod,
Works and Days 448-57, my translation)
I
believe that this passage expresses the poet’s identification with the crane,
by which I mean more specifically that he senses her as conveying a poetic
message that he incorporates into his own.
To be sure, the segment is
traditionally interpreted simply as first giving a signal to plow at a certain
time to make sure there will be food next year, which naturally leads to the
thought of keeping the beasts that draw the plow in good health, whereupon the
poet is put in mind of some general principles about preparation in a not
particularly logical way. However, that view is clearly connected with a view
of the second half of the poem as seriously constituting a farmer’s almanac,
which has long been discredited on a variety of grounds. (I only
give the most recent of such arguments in Beall 2004a, 2005).
Rather, the tight artistic
integration of these ten lines (via the enjambment “winter/ rainy,” the thought
of oxen, and that of the wagon) suggests that the crane is not just a sign for
plowing, but a symbol of organized activity in general. This bird is surely
excellent for that purpose. Its myth corpus shows it to be a busy creature, in
Moreover, the message this symbol
communicates to our poet is close to his heart. The quoted segment introduces a
carefully constructed section spanning the next 33 lines, nominally about
plowing, before another 11 express the general need to work and thus match the
initial thought. The overall section says it concerns organization in plowing,
but is easily read as an essay about the need for organization generally with
plowing as a synecdoche for the broader subject (Beall 2004a). And of course,
as the Hesiod stressed in the manuals has said earlier in the poem, work is the
order of the day.
With all that said,
just how are we to think the author of our poem sensed the crane
psychologically? To be sure, he will not have had an advanced theory
of the relation of bird calls to his poetry. Today some think that
humans and birds arrive at music, while our “closest” relatives the apes do
not, because the process involved is convergent rather than ordinary evolution
(Mithen 2006). Others may disapprove of
any comparison of human music with bird articulation. But given that
he lacked knowledge of such intricacies, what Hesiod will have noticed was that
nightingales and the like were closer to his own voice than was the lowing of
cattle.
On
the other hand, the work itself tells us the Muses gave the poet the ability to
produce song that is “unlimited” (W&D 662), so much so that,
arguably, it is normally understood only by the gods (Collins
1999). Thus if the alternative is to consider the crane’s
vocalization as pure data, and external to the author’s mind, I prefer to
believe that he thought the Muses were allowing him to translate the message of
a fellow poet from crane-speak to Greek, in order to incorporate it into his
own message.
In any case, in one way or another
Hesiod was close to the crane’s thrust, as also (to bring in the other voiced
creatures of the later part of the poem) to the cuckoo’s message that the world
is uncertain (W&D 483-90; cf. Beall 2004a). The swallow (568) and
the crow (679, 747) convey warnings, but the cicada (582) is not really a bird,
and indeed seems to be a false poet (Beall 2004b). That is, it entices us into
a regime that seems idyllic but really features problems like worn-out men
faced with women wanting them to engage in sexual exertion (582-88).
Moreover, it is clear that these
creatures were no more exotic to Hesiod than were lions to Homer. He
must have been impressed with, say, the crane because it was industrious and
flew high, not because it was outside his milieu. And all these creatures’
voices were annual events.
To be sure, the last point is
connected with the issue of whether or not there is a real difference between
domestic and wild animals. Barney Nelson argues that this modern dichotomy is a
social construct (B. Nelson 2000), and indeed it appears that it had not yet
come to mind in archaic
To conclude, in the well known
Teutonic myth Siegfried understood birdsong after killing a dragon and drinking
its blood. But this story is evidently a development from the idea
of hunting/gathering cultures that the ability is acquired by eating snakes (Eliade 1964). As for the Greeks, there was a myth wherein a
person understood birds after pet snakes licked his ears (Apollodorus
1.86; cf. Pliny, Natural History 10.70). Surely their belief
in this possibility indicates that they did not feel as far from feathered
speakers as do we featherless ones today. Thus we have the thought of two of
the principals of archaic Greece: after Homer has indicated that at least his
characters exhibit a closeness to animals in a violent way, Hesiod brings out a
gentler sense of union with at least some of them, and on his own part.
*© 2007 E. F. Beall. I thank Barney Nelson for her criticism of
an earlier draft.
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