Aelian's On the Nature of Animals

Aelian,

Gregory McNamee (Editor)

3.73 · Rating details · 33 ratings · 2 reviews

Not much can be said with certainty about the life of Claudius Aelianus, known to us as Aelian. He was born sometime between A.D. 165 and 170 in the hill town of Praeneste, what is now Palestrina, about twenty-five miles from Rome, Italy. He grew up speaking that towns version of Latin, a dialect that other speakers of the language seem to have found curious, butsomewhat Not much can be said with certainty about the life of Claudius Aelianus, known to us as Aelian. He was born sometime between A.D. 165 and 170 in the hill town of Praeneste, what is now Palestrina, about twenty-five miles from Rome, Italy. He grew up speaking that town’s version of Latin, a dialect that other speakers of the language seem to have found curious, but—somewhat unusually for his generation, though not for Romans of earlier times—he preferred to communicate in Greek. Trained by a sophist named Pausanias of Caesarea, Aelian was known in his time for a work called Indictment of the Effeminate, an attack on the recently deceased emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who was nasty even by the standards of Imperial Rome. He was also fond of making almanac-like collections, only fragments of which survive, devoted to odd topics such as manifestations of the divine and the workings of the supernatural.

His De Natura Animalium (On the Nature of Animals) has a similar patchwork quality, but it was esteemed enough in his time to survive more or less whole, and it is about all that we know of Aelian’s work today. A mostly randomly ordered collection of stories that he found interesting enough to relate about animals—whether or not he believed them—Aelian’s book constitutes an early encyclopedia of animal behavior, affording unparalleled insight into what ancient Romans knew about and thought about animals—and, of particular interest to modern scholars, about animal minds.

If the science is sometimes sketchy, the facts often fanciful, and the history sometimes suspect, it is clear enough that Aelian had a fine time assembling the material, which can be said, in the most general terms, to support the notion of a kind of intelligence in nature and that extends human qualities, for good and bad, to animals. His stories, which extend across the known world of Aelian’s time, tend to be brief and to the point, and many return to a trenchant question: If animals can respect their elders and live honorably within their own tribes, why must humans be so appallingly awful?

Aelian is as brisk, as entertaining, and as scholarly a writer as Pliny, the much better known Roman natural historian. That he is not better known is simply an accident: he has not been widely translated into English, or indeed any European language. This selection from his work will introduce readers to a lively mind and a witty writer who has much to tell us.
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Paperback, 192 pages

Published July 12th 2011 by Trinity University Press (first published January 1st 2009)

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Apr 05, 2020 Rossdavidh rated it liked it

Shelves: black

Aelian is here to prove, that using bogus info that you heard somewhere, sometime, in order to get people's attention, is not something that began with internet listicles.

"If you see a male hyena this year, next year you would see a female one. The reverse is true. Hyenas share both sexes, and they marry, and having done so, they change sex year by year. This is a fact and not a fancy tale..."

The organization of this amazing and delightful book, is more or less absent. It is a bunch of more or Aelian is here to prove, that using bogus info that you heard somewhere, sometime, in order to get people's attention, is not something that began with internet listicles.

"If you see a male hyena this year, next year you would see a female one. The reverse is true. Hyenas share both sexes, and they marry, and having done so, they change sex year by year. This is a fact and not a fancy tale..."

The organization of this amazing and delightful book, is more or less absent. It is a bunch of more or less disconnected "facts" about every animal under the sun (or the sea), and he does not dwell too long on one before moving on to the next, and then a chapter or two later circling back to the first with another interesting "fact". It is all rather like sitting next to a batty old fellow who rattles off odd things he has heard, one after another, without any particular rhyme or reason to it.

"After eating marjoram, a tortoise is brave enough to treat a viper with disdain. If marjoram cannot be found, it eats rue. If it fails to find either one, though, the viper will kill it."

Every once in a while, he says something that I could possibly imagine to be true.

"The eagle is a raptor, feeding on whatever flesh it can find. It eats rabbits, does, goslings, and many other creatures. The eagle that is called "Zeus's bird," however, eats no meat, but lives on grass instead. It has never heard of Pythagoras of Samos, but even so it is a vegetarian."

But, given the source, I am going to remain agnostic on the question of whether there even is an eagle called Zeus's bird.

What, you may ask, is the point of reading a book of untrue statements about animals, from 1900 years ago no less? Well, I think it is, to see how balderdash got passed around in ancient times. It is not as if I did not know that there were a lot of things believed in ancient times, which were untrue. However, some of the statements in this book are so clearly absurd that I have to believe the wiser sort of person living in the Roman Empire in the late 2nd century A.D. was able to tell, 'this Aelian seems a little off'. Maybe someone believed them, but I can imagine ancient Roman Senators bemoaning the problems of 'fake news'.

"If a marten's testicles are hung on a woman, either by trickery or with her knowledge, then she will become celibate and barren. If a marten's guts are ground up by people with expert knowledge in such things and then dropped into wine, the potion will ruin friendships and break families apart."

Well you know, I can't say about the rest, but I could believe that dropping marten's guts into the wine might ruin your friendships for you, yes. Perhaps it might even get you cast out of the family. Plus, if you have marten testicles hanging from you, it may be that you will be celibate whether that is your wish or not.

This is, I admit, not the sort of book one would wish to read cover to cover. But, why not begin your day with a dash of balderdash, a parcel of the impossible, a bit of absurd? It helps one to keep a skeptical eye on everything anyone tells you the rest of the day. ...more

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