RICERCA ITALIANA     

Encyclopedic lexicon of animals in Greek and Roman culture

Università degli Studi di Siena

Abstract

This project takes its start from this observation: in every culture, and particularly in the world of pre-industrial societies with a strong rural vocation, animals are a factor of relevance, non only real but also symbolic. This importance is clearly visible in Greek and Roman culture. There is an enormous number of stories, images, metaphors, ways of saying that used the animal referent; animal figures played a signifcant role in many literary genres, such as epic poetry (Homeric similes and Ovidian metamorphoses), science (physmiognomy), and fables. Compared to our times, animals were involved in much more cultural contexts, such as magic and divination, religion and medicine. The "Encyclopedic lexicon of animals in Greek and Roman culture" aims to collect all the opinions, notions (both popular and "scientific"), beliefs and images that marked the cultural fisionomy of the most important animals of the ancient world.
Each encyclopedic entry will be taken from a wide dossier of ancient sources, that includes the most famous literary texts, tecnical and scientific treatises, lexica and scholia, papyri and epigraphs, iconography. This dossier will not have a specific chronological boundary but will be limited to the pagan sources; this choice is motivated by the fact that the cultural figures of many animals were deeply altered in Judaic and Christian religion.
Animals will be chosen according to their cultural relevance; animals that are poorly attested in cultural elaborations and mentioned in zoological treatises only (Aristoteles, Plinius the Elder) will not be considered.
The materials collected for every entry will necessarily be very rich and variegated; the members of the project will select out of this set the more relevant features of each animal figure (i.e. the features Greek and Roman culture considered the most peculiar and permanent in each animal species) and the more significant directions of the symbolic elaborations (i.e.the narrative routes through which notions and beliefs concerning each animal species were conveyed).
The goal of this project is to put at the disposal of classical scholars a valid reference work collecting all the elements that formed the shared knowledge of ancient societies about animals. <<<

Principal Investigator

Maurizio BETTINI Università degli Studi di SIENA

Research Objectives

The goal of this project is to put at the disposal of classical scholars a valid reference work collecting all the elements that formed the shared knowledge of ancient societies about animals. Being a cultural construction, animal figures offer very effective tools in order to detect the correct interpretation of many symbolic fields: the studies on the weasel (Bettini 1998) and on the dog (Franco 2003b) have shown how the analysis of some animal figures can enlighten some important aspects of the cultural system of the society that has produced such representations. Animal figures can moreover indicate the right way to orientate ourselves inside a complex symbolic field, in order to reconstruct a cultural system that is far from our direct experience: by studying the weasel, one inevitably enters the world of childbirth, inhabited by midwives and witches, full of knots and ties; by studying the dog, one faces unexpected questions such as the definition of the friend and the asymmetrical friendship, the qualities of the master (male) and those of subordinates (female, servile, animal). The construction of the encyclopedic entries of the most important animals, is a work that can open new relevant perspectives for the study of many aspects of classical culture.
The project will also include etno-anthropological perspectives, such as the persistence or the disappearance of the ancient features of each animal in the European folklore; the comparison between the features of the ancient animal and its representation in other contemporary cultural contexts outside Europe. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Around each animal image every culture collects a huge amount of beliefs, notions, opinions, models (inspired by observation or produced by imagination), which constitute the rich set entries of the cultural encyclopedia. In other words, in every culture each animal owns a complex physionomy which does not match with a simple definition such as those of the dictionary or taxonomy or zoology (i.e. "Dog: animal of the species Canis familiaris. Origins: wolf domesticated. Quadruped. Provided with tail" etc.). In order to visualize all the elements associated to the name and idea of an animal by an hypothetical 'average' member of a given culture, we must think to a proper encyclopedical entry. This entry will enclose a various (and potentially unlimited) set of notions, beliefs, and symbolical practices (verbal, iconic, performative).
The notion of encyclopedia represents at best the necessary competence for a correct interpretation of the texts (literature and myth, but also iconography and rituals) in which the animal images play a relevant role: an exemplary study is C. Geertz's essay on the Balinese cockfight, where the very reconstruction of the part of the encyclopedia related to the animal enables the ethnographer to explain the meaning and social value of the rite observed. In fact, in the cultural encyclopedia are recorded not only the traditional mental notions and images associated with the animal, but also the pragmatic 'instructions' needed for clarifying its meaning in the different contexts. Only by knowing these instructions we are likely to follow the right path of inference, i.e. the interpretation 'authorized' by the knowledge shared by a given society.
To understand and explain an instance of a symbolic animal, the alien observer (as we are toward the ancient cultures) needs therefore to recover the encyclopedic competence by means of a careful reconstruction of the animal 'entry'. In this respect there is still much work to be done. If some classical scholars have written many studies on human-animal relationship (Dierauer, Lanata, Cassin e Labarrière, Bettini, Franco), on the ancient exotic animals (Li Causi, Mancini), and on the ancient zoology (Vegetti, Bodson, Carbone), the cultural representation of the single species in the ancient encyclopedia has not received the due attention yet. The publications on this matter are quite few, and in many cases they are simply useful source-books: see for instance the entries regarding animals in the Realencyclopädie by Pauly-Wissowa, where the ancient sources are generally collected in an heterogeneous way, the historical interest is the most important, and the descriptions shift, without a neat distinction, from the level of the Realien to that of the mental representations. The same can be said about the positivistic studies by O. Keller. Other works such as J.M.C. Toynbee's essay on animals in the Roman culture or those of J. Prieur and J. Dumont are too generic to give adequate support to the interpretation of specific symbolic uses of an animal image (verbal metaphors or rituals), a result that can be reached only through a careful and exhaustive study, based on the whole corpus of available data for each single animal.
The scholar who wishes to explain an animal image in a text (literary, iconic, ritualistic) has to look for essays published on various reviews or to make use of some glossaries and collections dedicated to particular classes of animals: on fishes the works of W. Thompson D'Arcy, De Saint-Denis, J. Cotte, F. Capponi and, more recent, the one by O. Longo, F. Ghiretti and E. Renna; on birds W. Thompson D'Arcy, J. Pollard, O. Longo; on insects M. Davies and J. Kathirithamby, and the study of Ian C. Beavis; on the ape the old work of W.C. MacDermott.
The few recent monographical studies based on up-to-date methods of textual analysis and on a careful reconstruction of the ancient encyclopedia are the essay by M. Bettini on the weasel and the studies of C. Mainoldi and C. Franco on the wolf and the dog. Useful is also the research of S. Georgoudi on the books of the Geoponica about horses and oxen, which is however in the form of commentary, so that the data are scattered in the notes. It is worth mentioning, as far as method is concerned, two short French essays of the Seventies: the first, by M. Detienne and J. Svenbro on wolves and the second one by J.-P. Vernant and M. Detienne on animal métis. A conference on the mythology of the swine in the European culture (from ancient times to the Middle Age) has been organized at Saint-Antoine l'Abbaye (Isère): the proceedings have been published by Ph. Walter. F. Gasti and E. Romano are the editors of a recent collection of essays, where we can find reconstructions of the ancient image of the wolf, the dog, and the elephant. Useful are also the essays on the animals in the Homeric epics (Schnapp-Gourbeillon, Lonsdale), and on the iconography of hunting (Schnapp, Barringer).
As we can see, what really lacks is a structured and well organized collection of ancient data on the most important animals in classical culture. Particularly serious is the absence of such encyclopaedic material for mammals, though they constituted one of the most important class of animals in the antiquity: many of the species included in this class were in fact quite common and counted the breeds/stocks of the most common domestic (canide, feline, equine, bovine, ovine, swine) and wild animals (wolves, wild swine, panthers), whose cultural representations were extremely rich and complex.
Our project will follow the trail of the studies on man-animal relationship that have been developed in the last thirty years on the impulse of the growing interest elicited by environmentalism and the animal-rights movement. This impulse has also raised a lively discussion, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, on the role played by animals in the processes of cultural construction: see the studies of T. Ingold, B. Noske, P. Shepard, and, in France, the researches of J.P Digard and the monographical issues 108 (1988) and 118 (1991) of the review "L'Homme". In Italy too anthropology has given signs of renewed interest; such a considerable amount of theoretical research has given rise to a new discipline, the zooanthropology, whose basic texts are published by R. Marchesini.
Such a stream of studies goes back to illustrious scholars. Following C. Lévi-Strauss' suggestion, according to which the animals are mostly "good to think", the anthropologists have questioned how each culture classifies animals and uses them for taxonomical and symbolical purposes, as much as for verbal practices promoting the making of social values. The Sixties saw a broad debate on the possible connections between the position of an animal in the taxonomical classification and the use of its cultural image in the symbolic representations, a debate in which some of the most famous anthropologists of the time such as E. Leach, S.J. Tambiah and M. Douglas took part. These topics were reconsidered during the Seventies by D. Sperber and J. Halverson. <<<