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Author: Stephen T. Newmyer Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136882634 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
Although reasoned discourse on human-animal relations is often considered a late twentieth-century phenomenon, ethical debate over animals and how humans should treat them can be traced back to the philosophers and literati of the classical world. From Stoic assertions that humans owe nothing to animals that are intellectually foreign to them, to Plutarch's impassioned arguments for animals as sentient and rational beings, it is clear that modern debate owes much to Greco-Roman thought. Animals in Greek and Roman Thought brings together new translations of classical passages which contributed to ancient debate on the nature of animals and their relationship to human beings. The selections chosen come primarily from philosophical and natural historical works, as well as religious, poetic and biographical works. The questions discussed include: Do animals differ from humans intellectually? Were animals created for the use of humankind? Should animals be used for food, sport, or sacrifice? Can animals be our friends? The selections are arranged thematically and, within themes, chronologically. A commentary precedes each excerpt, transliterations of Greek and Latin technical terms are provided, and each entry includes bibliographic suggestions for further reading.
Author: Stephen T. Newmyer Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136882634 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
Although reasoned discourse on human-animal relations is often considered a late twentieth-century phenomenon, ethical debate over animals and how humans should treat them can be traced back to the philosophers and literati of the classical world. From Stoic assertions that humans owe nothing to animals that are intellectually foreign to them, to Plutarch's impassioned arguments for animals as sentient and rational beings, it is clear that modern debate owes much to Greco-Roman thought. Animals in Greek and Roman Thought brings together new translations of classical passages which contributed to ancient debate on the nature of animals and their relationship to human beings. The selections chosen come primarily from philosophical and natural historical works, as well as religious, poetic and biographical works. The questions discussed include: Do animals differ from humans intellectually? Were animals created for the use of humankind? Should animals be used for food, sport, or sacrifice? Can animals be our friends? The selections are arranged thematically and, within themes, chronologically. A commentary precedes each excerpt, transliterations of Greek and Latin technical terms are provided, and each entry includes bibliographic suggestions for further reading.
Author: Patricia A. Johnston Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 144389821X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 545
Book Description
This volume brings together a variety of approaches to the different ways in which the role of animals was understood in ancient Greco-Roman myth and religion, across a period of several centuries, from Preclassical Greece to Late Antique Rome. Animals in Greco-Roman antiquity were thought to be intermediaries between men and gods, and they played a pivotal role in sacrificial rituals and divination, the foundations of pagan religion. The studies in the first part of the volume examine the role of the animals in sacrifice and divination. The second part explores the similarities between animals, on the one hand, and men and gods, on the other. Indeed, in antiquity, the behaviour of several animals was perceived to mirror human behaviour, while the selection of the various animals as sacrificial victims to specific deities often was determined on account of some peculiar habit that echoed a special attribute of the particular deity. The last part of this volume is devoted to the study of animal metamorphosis, and to this end a number of myths that associate various animals with transformation are examined from a variety of perspectives.
Author: Ingvild Saelid Gilhus Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134169159 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 616
Book Description
Consulting a wide range of key texts and source material, Animals, Gods and Humans covers 800 years and provides a detailed analysis of early Christian attitudes to, and the position of, animals in Greek and Roman life and thought. Both the pagan and Christian conceptions of animals are rich and multilayered, and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus expertly examines the dominant themes and developments in the conception of animals. Including study of: biographies of figures such as Apollonus of Tyana; natural history; the New Testament via Gnostic texts; the church fathers; and from pagan and Christian criticism of animal sacrifice, to the acts of martyrs, the source material and detailed analysis included in this volume make it a veritable feast of information for all classicists.
Author: Gordon Lindsay Campbell Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191035157 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 657
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life is the first comprehensive guide to animals in the ancient world, encompassing all aspects of the topic by featuring authoritative chapters on 33 topics by leading scholars in their fields. As well as an introduction to, and a survey of, each topic, it provides guidance on further reading for those who wish to study a particular area in greater depth. Both the realities and the more theoretical aspects of the treatment of animals in ancient times are covered in chapters which explore the domestication of animals, animal husbandry, animals as pets, Aesop's Fables, and animals in classical art and comedy, all of which closely examine the nature of human-animal interaction. More abstract and philosophical topics are also addressed, including animal communication, early ideas on the origin of species, and philosophical vegetarianism and the notion of animal rights.
Author: Christopher A. Faraone Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107011124 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
The first general critique of the interpretations of animal sacrifice established by Walter Burkert, the late J.-P. Vernant, and Marcel Detienne.
Author: Stephen T. Newmyer Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135042845 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Ancient Greeks endeavored to define the human being vis-à-vis other animal species by isolating capacities and endowments which they considered to be unique to humans. This approach toward defining the human being still appears with surprising frequency, in modern philosophical treatises, in modern animal behavioral studies, and in animal rights literature, to argue both for and against the position that human beings are special and unique because of one or another attribute or skill that they are believed to possess. Some of the claims of man’s unique endowments have in recent years become the subject of intensive investigation by cognitive ethologists carried out in non-laboratory contexts. The debate is as lively now as in classical times, and, what is of particular note, the examples and methods of argumentation used to prove one or another position on any issue relating to the unique status of human beings that one encounters in contemporary philosophical or ethological literature frequently recall ancient precedents. This is the first book-length study of the ‘man alone of animals’ topos in classical literature, not restricting its analysis to Greco-Roman claims of man’s intellectual uniqueness, but including classical assertions of man’s physiological and emotional uniqueness. It supplements this analysis of ancient manifestations with an examination of how the commonplace survives and has been restated, transformed, and extended in contemporary ethological literature and in the literature of the animal rights and animal welfare movements. Author Stephen T. Newmyer demonstrates that the anthropocentrism detected in Greek applications of the ‘man alone of animals’ topos is not only alive and well in many facets of the current debate on human-animal relations, but that combating its negative effects is a stated aim of some modern philosophers and activists.
Author: A. Harden Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137319313 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
This sourcebook presents nearly 200 specially-translated Greek and Roman texts from Homer to Plutarch, revealing the place of the animal in the moral consciousness of the Classical era. Philosophical, historical, dramatic and poetic texts explore how animals were regarded in all aspects of ancient life, from philosophy to farming.
Author: Adrienne Mayor Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691245606 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs, mammoths, and other extinct animals influenced some of the most spectacular creatures of classical mythology Griffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and Giants—these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact—in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans. As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground. Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.