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Dirt Flight Omen Interchangeable Roadside Features Intended to Provide Occasional Shade Or Raise Property Values

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Dirt Flight Omen Interchangeable Roadside Features Intended to Provide Occasional Shade Or Raise Property Values 25 Frankel Institue Annual 2018 missing? Another odd moment happens right after split and saw humans as if they were wood. The elders the first witness replies, “under a mastic”: Daniel do not invalidate themselves with their fictional concludes he is lying, even before hearing the the testimony; they unwittingly each conjure a tree whose other witness. “Truly you have lied to the detriment very name pronounces a capital judgment the moment of your own head,” he replies somewhat awkwardly, it comes into being. Rather than fading into the “for this very day the angel of God will split you in two” background, the trees in Susanna speak—about 1,900 (v. 55). The commentators who note these irregu- years before modern forensic science would recognize larities generally shrug and write them off as just one that the material world always has a story to tell. ● or two baffling features of an ancient text. But maybe we should lie down in the dirt and ask the trees. In the ancient Mediterranean world, trees were not dirt flight omen interchangeable roadside features intended to provide occasional shade or raise property values. They nurtured creatures from mice to humans with their fruit, nuts, and oil; they stood as boundary markers and mnemonic devices on farms; they provided timber for ships, beams, and ritual objects. They built temples; they formed sacred groves. Every now and then they would speak in the voice of a god. “This was the fate he said the gods had destined to end the many toils of Heracles: this was the prophecy of the ancient oak tree,” Sophocles writes (Trachinae 169–172). A tree also pronounces Abraham’s life complete, when he encounters a great tamarisk with over 300 branches and he hears “a voice from the branches saying, ‘Holy are you because you have kept the purpose for which you were sent’” (Testament of Abraham, 3.3). In Susanna, C. M. CHIN each tree comes with its own oracle, too. We have seen the mastic’s; when the other witness invokes an oak, Daniel mouths: “Sinner! Now the angel of Birds the Lord stands with the sword to saw you in two” (Sus 59). Many have noted the Greek puns in the he Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder says names of the trees and the violent reprisals they that cuckoos are the result of a seasonal announce: the schinon (mastic) will schisei (split) transformation of hawks: “The cuckoo one lying elder; the prinos (oak) will prisai (saw) the seems to be made by changing its shape other. Few, however, have remarked on the specific Tout of a hawk at a certain season of the year, as the type of arboreal vengeance in these words, which rest of the hawks do not appear then, except on a 26 Frankel Institue Annual 2018 very few days, and the cuckoo itself also after being of them devoured the other? What is clear, in this seen for a moderate period of the summer is not world, is that aliveness was more mass than indi- observed afterwards. [….] Moreover a hawk will eat vidual, and that matter was liable to be quickened a cuckoo, if ever both have appeared at the same at any time, to take individual form, briefly, before time: the cuckoo is the only one of all the birds that reverting to mass again. The cuckoo and the hawk is killed by its own kind” (Natural History 10.11, tr. merged; the mass of the world changed from one H. Rackham). Not everyone in the ancient world bird to another. agreed about the seasonally alternating nature of the Birds in masses also meant things. They meant yes hawk and the cuckoo. Aristotle, for instance, thought or they meant no. Ovid says that at the founding of that the two birds were far too different in shape and Rome, Romulus said to his brother Remus, “Great size for this transformation to be plausible. But even faith is put in birds. Let us try the bird omen” (Fasti Aristotle conceded that some species did transform 4.814, tr. V. M. Warrior). Remus saw six vultures, into others at particular times: “The redbreast and Romulus saw twelve, Romulus became king of the redstart change into one another; the former Rome. After Romulus’ death, Livy writes that Numa is a winter bird, the latter a summer one, and the Pompilius allowed birds to tell him whether he difference between them is practically limited to the should take up the Roman kingship: “[L]ooking coloration of their plumage. In the same way with out over the city and the countryside beyond, the beccafico and the blackcap; these change into [the augur] prayed to the gods and marked off the one another. The beccafico appears about autumn, regions from east to west, the areas to the south and the blackcap as soon as autumn has ended” were designated as ‘right,’ those to the north as (History of Animals 9.49b, tr. d’A. W. Thompson). ‘left.’ He fixed in his mind a sign opposite him and These stories suggest an ancient world that was a as far away as the eye could see. Then . he prayed mass of alive matter, teeming, shapeshifting, and as follows: ‘Father Jupiter, if it is right that this man only sometimes stable. Different alive things rose Numa Pompilius whose head I hold, be king in and fell out of each other, ate or merged with each Rome, I beg that you reveal to us clear signs within other. Things that seemed inanimate might also turn those limits that I have set.’ He then specified the out to be lively: Aristotle’s student Theophrastus auspices that he wished to be sent. Sent they were” idly wonders, at one point in his treatise On Stones, (Ab Urbe Condita 1.18, tr. Warrior). The matter of whether rocks can give birth. Some centuries later, birds was not just mutable and seasonal. It also the Neoplatonist Plotinus will find it obvious that involved immediate time and direction and flight, rocks grow like plants do. Sometimes this mercurial as far away as the eye could see, and all of it held aliveness meant it was hard to tell how many alive meaning. Roman augurs marked out lines of sight things there were: are a hawk and a cuckoo two alive and times of silence, and what birds did in those things, or just one? When a hawk eats a cuckoo, lines and moments was sacred, because gods said does it turn into two hawks, one on the inside yes or no in the matter of birds. and one on the outside? Or is this a temporal Birds became other birds, and birds became gods conundrum as much as a biological one: a before and spoke like gods, and sometimes birds became and an after appeared at the same time, and one people and spoke like people, too. To return to Pliny, language, and we [humans] lack [reason], because he tells us that “nevertheless the most remarkable we say things that are not meaningful to them” instance in this record is the dish belonging to the (On Abstinence from Killing Animals 3.6.3, tr. G. tragic actor Clodius Aesop, rated at the value of Clark). In this world, actors are like trained birds, 100,000 sesterces, in which he served birds that but speaking birds are also like philosophers. sang some particular song or talked with human The differences between alive things, between speech, which he acquired at the price of 6,000 hawk and cuckoo or actor and raven, have a sesterces apiece, led by no other attraction except disquieting tendency to disappear. And yet the the desire to indulge in a sort of cannibalism in more these boundaries blur, the more the powers eating these birds” (Natural History 10.72, tr. and thoughts of one being emerge in the body of Rackham). Starting with the fact that birds can another. Alive matter gathers its many selves to speak. speak, the late-third-century philosopher Porphyry Hawks, actors, redstarts, and ravens: listening will argue that birds, like people, are governed by through them, we can begin to hear the words universal divine reason. To deny this, he says, would of ancient matter. ● be “as if ravens claimed that theirs was the only .
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