THE TALKING GREEKS When considering the question of what makes us human, the ancient Greeks provided numerous suggestions. This book argues that the defining criterion in the Hellenic world, however, was the most obvi- ous one: speech. It explores how it was the capacity for authoritative speech which was held to separate humans from other animals, gods from humans, men from women, Greeks from non-Greeks, citizens from slaves, and the mundane from the heroic. John Heath illus- trates how Homer’s epics trace the development of immature young men into adults managing speech in entirely human ways and how in Aeschylus’ Oresteia only human speech can disentangle man, beast, and god. Plato’s Dialogues are shown to reveal the consequences of Socratically imposed silence. With its examination of the Greek focus on speech, animalization, and status, this book offers new readings of key texts and provides significant insights into the Greek approach to understanding our world. john heath is Professor of Classics at Santa Clara University. He is the author of numerous articles on Latin and Greek literature, myth and culture. His previous publications include Actaeon, the Unman- nerly Intruder (1992), Who Killed Homer? (with Victor Davis Hanson, 1998;revised edition, 2001) and Bonfire of the Humanities (with Victor Davis Hanson and Bruce Thornton, 2001). THE TALKING GREEKS Speech, Animals, and the Other in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato JOHN HEATH Santa Clara University cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridage.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521832649 © John Heath 2005 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. 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Contents Preface and acknowledgments page vi Introduction 1 part ispeech, animals, and human status in homer 1 Bellowing like a bull: Humans and other animals in Homer 39 2 Controlling language: Telemachus learns to speak 79 3 Talking through the heroic code: Achilles learns to tell tales 119 part ii listening for the other in classical greece 4 Making a difference: The silence of Otherness 171 part iii speech, animals, and human status in classical athens 5 Disentangling the beast: Humans and other animals in the Oresteia 215 6 Socratic silence: The shame of the Athenians 259 Epilogue 315 Bibliography 334 Index 387 v Preface and acknowledgments Iwrote most of this book over the past seven summers. Each fall I have returned to classes, where the tolerant smiles and glazed eyes of my freshmen students quickly reminded me that the relevance of the Greeks can easily be lost on the uninitiated – and the scholar. I am fortunate to have spent my academic life teaching bright undergraduates who, with a little coaxing (okay – sometimes with a lot of coaxing), have often joined me in exploring these ancient texts. I thank them. More pragmatically, I am grateful to two classical journals for permis- sion to publish here revised versions of previously published articles. Part of Chapter 2 appeared as “Telemachus pepnumenos:Growing into an epithet,” in Mnemosyne 54 (2001) 129–57. Chapter 5 is largely based on “Disentangling the beast: Humans and other animals in Aeschylus’ Oresteia,” in JHS 119 (1999) 17–47. The editors and anonymous referees involved in these publi- cations were extremely helpful. Santa Clara University generously awarded two of my students summer grants to check references and help create the index. I am much indebted to the University and especially to Tom Garvey and Christine Lechelt. Several colleagues and friends have offered perceptive insights on individ- ual chapters: Walter Englert, Michelle McKenna, Helen Moritz, William Prior, and Gail Blumberg. Nora Chapman, Mark Edwards, and Victor Hanson read the entire manuscript when it was still a rather unattractive adolescent. Lisa Adams loaned her acumen and acute editorial eye to the penultimate draft. I cannot thank them enough for their many invalu- able comments, queries, and suggestions. If this book is still ungainly, it is not their fault. The anonymous readers for the press were open-minded, insightful, and especially helpful in convincing me to eliminate several polemical divagations of which I had grown unhealthily fond. To my edi- tor at Cambridge, Michael Sharp, I feel a particular debt of gratitude for having faith in the intellectual merits of what first crossed his desk as a slightly grumpy analysis of “animals and the Other” in ancient Greece. vi Preface and acknowledgments vii Finally, my greatest debt is to Emma, who arrived just when I was starting this book. Her intelligence and optimism are constant sources of inspira- tion, as well as proof that human nature is not determined entirely by genes. It would also be unforgivable for me not to acknowledge with affection Mel and Andi, whose joyful lives and unhappy fates have served as an impetus for my reflection on the duties we have to all conscious creatures, both articulate and silent. Introduction The thesis of this book is embarrassingly unsophisticated: humans speak; other animals don’t. This zoological platitude formed the basis – indeed, the motivation – for much of the ancient Greeks’ profound and influential exploration of what it means to be human. It has long been found useful in both literary and anthropological studies to quote out of context Levi-Strauss’´ famous observation (he was critiquing totemism) that animals are chosen to convey certain ideas not because they are good to eat, but because they are good to think with.1 But for the agrarian Greeks, whose hands were dirty from the earth and animals they worked with and struggled against every day, animals were also good to think about. The Greeks were hard-working pragmatists as well as our intel- lectual and cultural forebears. They were farmers, and their understanding of human nature and animals was shaped by very different “formative” experiences than those of most of us who study them. To take what I hope is an extreme example, my own childhood familiarity with animals in the suburbs of Los Angeles was limited to a series of family basset-hounds (not exactly Laconian hunting dogs), my sister’s pet rat, and a blood- sucking half-moon parrot named Socrates, whom my mother, like the Athenian mob 2,400 years before, finally shipped off to Hades with a tainted beverage. In the United States, where family farmers are no longer “statistically relevant” – where there are more prison inmates than full-time farmers of any kind, and where ranchers are a dying breed2 – most of us regularly encounter animals only as fuzzy house companions or on our plates. In this, we are very much unlike the ancient Greeks we read and write about. Fewofthem could afford to feed a mouth that did not help put food 1 Levi-Strauss´ (1969) 162; see Lloyd (1983) 8 n.7. 2 Hanson (1996)xvi; Schlosser (2001) 8 with 278 n.8, 133–47.Itissobering to remember that not until 1910 did the United States have more industrial laborers than farm workers. A recent survey showed that many of us spend more than 95 percent of our lives indoors; Bekoff (2002) 139. 1 2 Introduction on the table in return. In a world where food shortage was just one bad harvest away, only the most wealthy could spare the produce to support ornamental creatures. (We will quickly be reminded that the bad boys of archaic literature, Hesiod and Semonides, included most wives under this rubric.) Possession of a “useless” animal was a mark of prestige, a statement of and advertisement for one’s status.3 Alcibiades’ large and handsome dog cost seventy minas and served the explicit purpose, according to Plutarch, of drawing attention to his owner’s notoriety, especially when Alcibiades whacked off its beautiful tail.4 Norare we much like the Greeks in our diet. The average American eats 197 pounds of meat each year, much of it shrink-wrapped or dispensed in cardboard boxes and buckets.5 Athens, on the other hand, which may have provided its citizens with twice as much meat as most other cities, probably distributed less than five pounds of beef yearly to individuals in public sacrifices.6 And the Greeks derived virtually all of what they called meat (krea)from animals whose throats were slit in religious ritual – cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats. Isocrates at one point (7.29)grumbles that the Athenians create festivals just for the free meat.7 Nevertheless, the hungry in antiquity 3 SeeSallares (1991) 311–13, 383.Heobserves that the horse in Athens was the prestige animal par excellence given its difficult diet, small size, and Attica’s lack of good pasture land and unsuitability to cavalry; see Arist. Pol. 1289b33–41.Purchasing, maintaining, and equipping a horse were expensive; see Anderson (1961) 136–9;Spence (1993) 183, 272–86, who estimates the cost of a horse alone was equivalent to ten months’ wages for a skilled craftsman in classical Athens.