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 >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>