Aelian's On the Nature of Animals

by Aelian, Gregory McNamee (Editor)

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 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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Animals, Classics, History, Nature

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

Claudius Aelianus, 3rd cent.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Said simply, this gets five stars because there is nothing quite like it known to me, and I just love that it exists.

[Javier · Rating 1 out of 5]

Estoy bastante acostumbrado a que, en la literatura clásica, la descripción de animales esté caracterizada por propiedades míticas, o simplemente, inexactas. Es algo que no me molesta puesto que, o bien se justifica en el contexto, o es una excusa para introducir algún tipo de simbolismo más allá de lo meramente zoológico.

Pero este no es el caso; aquí Eliano se pone a nombrar infinidad de animales sin órden aparente, y sin ninguna experiencia de campo, prueba o proceso deductivo que lo avale, en absoluto. Al principio es algo más o menos pintoresco; incluso puede que el lector desprevenido piense que se trata de descripciones propias de la época. Gran error: por momentos, ni siquiera el mismo Eliano cree en lo que está relatando, y tiene que escudarse en los "si no me creen, preguntenle a tal" o, "a estos prodigios inauditos lo ha atestiguado cual".

Hay atisbos aquí y allá de algo que aparenta ser una metáfora o análisis moral extendido a los animales, pero en la gran mayoría de los casos se trata de una recopilación de la bibliografía más fantasiosa que se haya podido encontrar en aquel tiempo, con detalles que el autor sacó de la galera para hacer el texto algo más interesante o morboso, según el caso.

Lo peor es que no existe una lógica o un esquema en absoluto, el autor comienza a describir formas y acciones del animal que se le ocurra: aquí habla de las águilas, en el siguiente párrafo cuenta algo de los pulpos, y luego pasa a los perros, los elefantes o el pez vaca.

Es un texto curioso, por el solo hecho de que algo así exista y haya sobrevivido al paso del tiempo, pero con el correr de las páginas se torna realmente insufrible y carente de sentido.

[Nyah · Rating 3 out of 5]

my dumbass thought that these were real facts at first 😭

[Rossdavidh · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Lulu]

c. 190-230

The story of Gilgamos (i.e. Gilgameš) in Aelian (NA
12.21,the only reference to Gilgameš by name in ancient Greek literature) must be of Mesopotamian origin – one of the abundant Mesopotamian legends about Gilgameš, which circulated in oral tradition, even though they were not all accommodated in the surviving Sumerian and Akkadian epics. Aelians story clearly comes from a source very well informed about Mesopotamian traditions,perhaps the Babyloniaca of Berossus (a priest of Bel-Marduk, with easy access to written Babylonian sources) or the Persica of Ctesias(who was also interested in Mesopotamian legends, see e.g. his tales about Semiramis, Ninus and Sardanapallus). The content of the story presents striking analogies with Mesopotamian tales about Gilgameš(e.g. that of the Sumerian King-List) or about other personages(Semiramis, Sargon, Etana).