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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 hir­sute 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 Miletus wrote a book, of which we still have a statement in his own words on the principle of the action of things in the world.  Namely, entities “give recompense and pay the penalty to one another for their injustice” (Anaximander fragment 1, my translation).  The thrust of this statement, Michael Gagarin argues, is that one entity prevails over another at any given time as they follow the route of Greek legal proceedings, as opposed to both participating in some cosmic equilibrium as certain earlier scholars presumed (Gagarin 2002).  True, he and most historians of philosophy speak of Anaximander employing a legal “metaphor,” thinking that the Milesian was comparing realms of the physical cosmos and of human society that were conceptually distinct.  It seems more likely that he thought of legal proceedings and what we now call physical processes alike as examples of a general sentiment (so Long 1980, Shelley 2000).  Nor do I see any particular reason to believe that his philo­so­phical sophistication was really greater than that implied in an approximately contemporary Indian expression of the world follow­ing natural law.  Namely, Makkhali Gosala said in opposition to the “karma” theory that things develop via “destiny, chance, and nature” (Basham 1951).  Still, Anaximander’s principle was so broad that it merged the realms of what is and what ought to be, the existential and the volitional (Angehrn 2000).  Surely it will have included such points as that, while carnivores kill herbivores and the latter’s birthrate is high to compensate, nonetheless there will be periods when the balance is upset until the pendulum swings back.  A corollary would be that human tyrannies are eventually overthrown by other tyrannies.  In short, Anax­­iman­der must have thought that humans and animals were close in their underlying basis.

            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 Dumont the pig is closeness.

            Still, some will say that that closeness is only to the economic interests Eumaeus serves; it may be that this passage says little, Dumont notwithstanding.  And the other archaic text I wish to consider, the Works and Days, is even more accused of pragmatism.  Hesiod’s poems have not traditionally been considered belletristic works, and the typical handbook of Greek literature written before the end of the last century will tell you that he preaches the drudgery of work, albeit he adds that the activity is necessary for survival, or even desirable for prosperity.  It will then say that the second half of the W&D, unfolding after these sentiments have been expressed, simply gives the details of this labor (with some questionable superstition thrown in at the end).  In this way the tome will imply or state baldly that the latter portion is of little interest.

            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 Greece (Thompson 1966) as elsewhere (Johnsgard 1983).  Its main claim to fame, its dance, is recognized as rather complex for the need to mate; thus that activity may be properly cultural (or hypertelic in Mâche’s terms), and in any case is well organized activity.  And the Greek term “geranos” meant both the bird and a lifting device, just as our “crane.”

            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 Greece.  For along with the closeness of some nominally wild creatures, as just discussed, the supposedly tame give pause.  This is especially so in the Homeric/Hesiodic treatment of the dog.  That creature is of course generally believed to have been the first to become associated with humans via the process we call the latter’s domestication of the former.  Nonetheless, its fierceness and general brutish behavior is generally dominant in Homer, from being coupled with carrion birds right at the outset of the Iliad (v. 1.4; cf. 2.393), to the clear nuance of its stock epithet “jagged-toothed” (10.360, 13.198), to evocation of its nature in insults, e.g., by Achilles to Agamemnon (1.225) or by Helen to herself (6.344), notwithstanding an example like Odysseus’s faithful Argus miraculously wagging his tail in recognition after his master’s twenty year absence (Odyssey 17.300 ff).  The Works and Days repeats many of these sentiments (vv. 67, 604, 796).  And as to other nominally domesticated creatures, Hesiod knows enough to advise procuring two plow-oxen just enough past their prime not to fight and break the plow (438-40).

            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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