Birds and Beasts Greek Anthology
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BIRDS AND BEASTS OF THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY BY NORMAN DOUGLAS Hunter of hares, may fortune smile on thee: Such is the gift of Pan. And thou, O fowler, who with lime and reeds Seekest to capture winged and feathered breeds That roost beneath this hill—praise Pan! Pan from his eyrie guards yon sacred copse; Bid him descend to join the chase, that he With hounds and reeds may thy companion be. LEONIDAS OF TARENTUM (F. W. M.). First Published, March 1928 Chapman and Hall Ltd. London Introduction to the Digital Edition This text was prepared for digital publication by David Badke in December, 2003. Author: Norman Douglas (1868-1952) was born in Austria to a Scottish father and a Scottish-German mother. He entered the British Foreign Office in 1893 and served as a diplomat in St. Petersburg. Douglas purchased property on Capri, but after financial difficulties in 1907 he existed in near poverty for almost two decades as he lived at times in Paris, Florence, Lisbon, and London, before returning to Capri in 1946. He wrote novels, autobiographical works and travel books, including The Forestal Conditions of Capri (1904), Siren Land (1911), Fountains in the Sand (1912), Old Calabria (1915), London Street Games (1916), South Wind (1917), In the Beginning (1928), Capri (1930), Summer Islands (1931), Looking Back (1933), Late Harvest (1946), Footnote on Capri (1952), and Venus in the Kitchen (1952). South Wind, a novel which explores the pleasures of the hedonistic life, earned Douglas epithets such as “pagan to the core” and “an unashamed connoisseur of pleasure.” Copyright: The original printed text by Norman Douglas (1868-1952) as published by Chapman and Hall (London) in 1928 is believed to be in the public domain under Canadian copyright law. It may or may not be in the public domain in other countries. If you believe that you have a legal claim on the original text, contact the editor of the digital edition at [email protected] with details of your claim. This digital edition is copyright 2003 by David Badke. Permission is hereby granted for any non- commercial use, provided that this copyright notice is included on all copies; for commercial use, please contact the editor at the above email address. Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to produce a digital edition that is accurate and equivalent in content to the original printed edition, the editor is not legally responsible for any errors or omissions. As with any information, use this edition with appropriate scholarly caution. If you discover errors in the text, please contact the editor at [email protected] with details, so corrections can be made. Edition: This digital edition includes the entire text of the revised edition of the printed book as published by Chapman and Hall in 1928. A Project Gutenberg eBook of the original 1927 edition of the book was used as the basis for this edition, but was extensively modified; see the end of this document for details. Formatting: The digital edition differs from the original printed text in layout, typeface and pagination, though all text of the original has been included as printed; no editing has been done and all original spelling and punctuation has been retained. The page numbers shown in this edition (at the bottom of each page) do not match the page numbering of the original printed edition. The original page numbers have been added to allow references to the print edition to be located; the number indicates the start of the print edition page. These page numbers appear imbedded in the text, formatted like this: [27]. The page numbers shown in the Table of Contents are those of the digital edition. The page numbers in the Index are those of the print edition; the Index is presented as it was in the print edition. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• The current version of this digital text edition can be found at: http://bestiary.ca/etexts/douglas1928/douglas1928.htm •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• To HIS FRIEND J. E. B. WHOSE VERSES HAVE ENLIVENED THIS DISMAL DISCOURSE CONTENTS Introduction .....................................................................1 Mammals.........................................................................4 Birds ..............................................................................26 Reptiles and Batrachians ...............................................49 Sea-Beasts .....................................................................59 Creeping Things ............................................................72 Bibliography..................................................................84 Index..............................................................................85 INTRODUCTION [1] Books have been written on the Natural History of the Bible, on that of Shakespeare, of Homer, Virgil and so forth: why not a similar one on the fauna of the Greek Anthology—though the flora, perhaps, would be even more interesting? So I often thought, while reading and re-reading this marvellous collection which had been my companion for many months past. Three years, I finally concluded, might suffice for the venture. Three years, under some vine-wreathed arbour, with the necessary books at one’s elbow, and one’s soul at ease ... Such a thing, it is obvious, should be a holiday performance; written con amore and not otherwise; in reverential, playfully- erudite fashion. Three years or even more; for I soon realized that the enterprise might well blossom—why not?—into a general treatise on ancient Natural History and the changes in animal economy which have occurred in the interval between then and now; that it would open up, incidentally, a number of questions social, aesthetic and [2] humanitarian, showing how the attitude of mankind towards birds and beasts has altered since those days. Three years, I kept on saying to myself—where shall they be found? I shall not find them. Be that a pretext for putting together the following notes which may serve as material for some one more fortunately situated. The pencillings then scrawled in my Anthology are fast fading; I amplified them later with references to such authorities as were accessible, but a good many others would have to be consulted if the undertaking were to be brought up to date, such as, for instance, von der Mühle’s book on the Birds of Greece, which I have not been able to procure. An undertaking, for the rest, of the gentlemanly kind; quite useless. No doubt an interesting little paper might be written, were we to investigate nothing but the Natural History of a single period or of a single poet, such as Meleager; or that of a well-marked group of them, like Lucilius and those other wits who introduced the animal world chiefly for the sake of the amusing similes they could extract therefrom; or if we devoted ourselves to one particular beast, say, the lion or the bee, and traced its progress through the Anthology from the [3] earliest to the latest references. A monograph of this kind would be brief indeed but not without a certain value from a scientific point of view. To compile, on the other hand, a long list of creatures mentioned only at hazard (some of the most conspicuous animals are not so much as named in this collection); a list of creatures mentioned by poets good and bad, poets of divers nationalities, poets scattered over a large geographical area and over a period of fifteen hundred years of time—to compile such a list: what more exquisitely unprofitable? Nevertheless, now that the thing is done, it strikes me that these utterances of a considerable section—segment, rather—of the ancient world present, for all their variety, a certain inner coherence. That must be because the writers happened to be poets, who view life from more or less the same angle through all the ages; poets, whose observations of natural phenomena were casual and unsystematic, whose 1 interpretation of such things shifts more slowly than that of the scientists, and shifts, when it does so, along a plane different from theirs. Not one of them can be called a poet-naturalist in the sense of some half-dozen English ones; Aristotle is modern, compared to the latest of them; indeed, he belongs to another world of thought. How [4] birds and beasts affect these men, what they say about them and what they fail to say, reveal, when taken as a whole, an outlook that is well riveted together—an outlook harmonious, and yet, with a faint persistence, dissimilar to that of the present day; it is as if we were glancing from a window upon some unfamiliar landscape. Like our own poets, they are quite ready to introduce the animal creation into their pages, and in so doing they often register what seem to be the most irrelevant and wearisome trivialities; some of their lines are sheer doggerel. But these trivialities, I think, have their significance. That is why the reader of the following pages cannot but notice that I have chronicled them one after the other with pedantic deliberation, to the verge of tediousness and possibly beyond it. My reason is this: it is trivialities, mere trivialities, which betray them in the long run; nothing but the cumulative weight of trifles can turn the scale and demonstrate the particular detail wherein our point of view has come to change from that of their time. For we find no Natural History, properly speaking, in the Greek Anthology; what its authors say about animals constitutes a human rather than a scientific document; it is a minute but clearly demarcated province in