Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full download Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words Jeremy Mynott file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words Jeremy Mynott file pdf all chapter on 2024
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-werewolf-in-the-ancient-world-
ogden/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-seven-wonders-of-the-ancient-
world-michael-denis-higgins/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-seven-wonders-of-the-ancient-
world-michael-denis-higgins-2/
https://ebookmass.com/product/a-short-history-of-the-ancient-
world-nicholas-k-rauh/
The Ancient Mediterranean Social World: A Sourcebook
Zeba A. Crook
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-ancient-mediterranean-social-
world-a-sourcebook-zeba-a-crook-2/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-ancient-mediterranean-social-
world-a-sourcebook-zeba-a-crook/
https://ebookmass.com/product/senses-cognition-and-ritual-
experience-in-the-roman-world-ancient-religion-and-cognition-
blanka-misic/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-tiny-and-the-fragmented-
miniature-broken-or-otherwise-incomplete-objects-in-the-ancient-
world-s-rebecca-martin/
https://ebookmass.com/product/art-science-and-the-natural-world-
in-the-ancient-mediterranean-300-bc-to-ad-100-joshua-james-
thomas/
Bir ds i n the Ancien t Wor ld
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Jeremy Mynott 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946194
ISBN 978–0–19–871365–4
Printed in Great Britain by
Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Preface
Birds pervaded the ancient world. They populated the landscapes in an abun-
dance and diversity scarcely imaginable in today’s highly developed Western
societies, and they would have impressed their physical presence on the daily
experience of ordinary people in town and country alike. Nightingales could be
heard singing in the suburbs of Athens and Rome; there were cuckoos, wry-
necks, and hoopoes within city limits; and eagles and vultures would have been
a common sight overhead in the countryside beyond. Not surprisingly, there-
fore, birds entered the popular imagination too, and figure prominently in the
creative literature, art, and drama of the time. They were a fertile source of sym-
bols and motifs for myth, folklore, and fable, and were central to the ancient
practices of augury and divination.
The ambition of this book is to bring together as much as possible of this
fascinating material in a connected and accessible way for the modern reader.
I present a large selection of readings from the ancient sources, all of which
I have translated freshly for the purpose. One hundred and twenty or so differ-
ent authors are represented—an indication in itself of the ubiquity and variety
of references to birds in classical literature—including all the most famous
Greek and Latin authors, along with many less well-known ones, and some
material not previously translated into English.
The book is organized thematically to illustrate the many different roles birds
played in the thousand years between about 700 bc and ad 300: as markers of
time, weather, and the seasons; as a resource for hunting, farming, eating, and
medicine; as pets, entertainments, mimics, and domestic familiars; as scavengers
and sentinels; as omens, auguries, and intermediaries between the gods and
humankind. There are also selections from early scientific writing about the tax-
onomy, biology, and behaviour of birds—the first real works of ornithology in
the Western tradition—as well as from more incidental but revealing observa-
tions in works of history, geography, and travel. The aim is to give as full a p icture
vi preface
as the evidence allows. The translations are supplemented with numerous illus-
trations from ancient art—paintings, pottery, sculpture, coins, and seals, all of
which are texts in their own right with related stories to tell.
There is a wealth of intriguing material to illustrate these themes. I revisit,
and sometimes reinterpret, such cases as: the functions of official ‘bird-watchers’
as military consultants (Homer); the observation of crane migrations to cali-
brate the agricultural calendar (Hesiod); the ‘crocodile bird’ that supposedly
acted as a toothpick to its fearsome host (Herodotus); the origins of expressions
like ‘cloud-cuckoo land’ and ‘jinxed’; the possible double entendres in ‘waking the
nightingale’ and ‘out with the cuckoo’ (Aristophanes); the enigmatic last words
of Socrates about paying the debt of a cockerel (Plato); the identity of Lesbia’s
pet ‘sparrow’ (Catullus); the sentinel geese on the Roman Capitol (Livy); the use
of flamingoes in haute cuisine (Apicius); and the Aesop fables about the raven
and the water jar (a feat of avian intelligence confirmed by modern experimen-
tation), and the eagle and the tortoise (a warning to be wary of special offers by
large airline operators).
I try to provide a strong line of narrative that gives a structure to these read-
ings and explains their literary and historical context. I also make comparisons,
where appropriate, with the roles birds have played in other cultures, including
our own, and encourage readers to reflect for themselves on their significance. I
see my task as that of a cultural and ornithological guide to some of these
remarkable exhibits from the ancient world, using birds as a prism through
which to explore both the similarities and the often surprising differences
between early conceptions of the natural world and our own. My hope is that
the work as a whole may in this way serve both as a contribution to the cultural
history of birds and as an introduction for non-classicists to this formative
period of Western history and some of its greatest literature.
As my references indicate, I am greatly indebted to many previous authors,
and in particular to three classical scholars who did pioneering research in this
area: the redoubtable D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who while a professor of
biology at Dundee produced his Glossary of Greek Birds in 1895; John Pollard,
who compiled an early thematic survey of the Greek material in 1977; and W. G.
Arnott, whose comprehensive A–Z dictionary of ancient bird names appeared
in 2007. These works were indispensable in gathering references to the key
sources, but they are organized on quite different principles from the present
book and provide few extended translations that would enable readers to engage
more directly with the texts discussed. A closer model in that respect, though a
preface vii
model one can only aspire to, is Keith Thomas’s study of a quite different
period and place in his Man and the Natural World: changing attitudes in
England, 1500–1800 (1983)—a masterpiece of organization that deploys an
astonishing range of sources in support of his narrative about how our current
views evolved.
In reading the ancient classical authors on these themes we tend to move
between experiences of happy recognition and deep puzzlement. We react just
as they did to some of the familiar sights and sounds they describe and we share
the same feelings of curiosity and wonderment. But one should never assume in
advance that modern concepts or categories will coincide with those that would
have seemed natural two and a half thousand years ago, and there are constant
risks of anachronism and misunderstanding. There were, for example, no words
in Greek or Latin meaning exactly what we mean by ‘nature’, ‘weather’, ‘land-
scape’, ‘science’, or ‘the environment’; and conversely some words that do seem
familiar sometimes had a different range of meanings then—even the word for
‘bird’. Take this passage from a comedy by Aristophanes, where a chorus of
birds is explaining to their human visitors the benefits they bestow on mankind:
What on earth does all that mean? At first sight, it looks as though the transla-
tor must have lost the plot somewhere. But it becomes clearer, or at least more
interesting, when you realize that the Greek word for a bird, ornis, was also their
word for an omen. The significance of birds—the ‘winged words’ of the subtitle—
is the theme running through this book.
There are also some outright mysteries of a cultural as well as a linguistic
kind. Why is there no account in the classical world of falconry as we now
understand it? Why did no one before Aristotle mention butterflies in descrip-
tions of the countryside? Why are singing nightingales almost always thought to
be female? And how could such bizarre beliefs as those in ‘halcyon [kingfisher]
days’ and ‘swan songs’ have originated and persisted? More generally, how could
the peoples who pioneered (and gave us the modern names of ) such s ubjects as
viii preface
Prefacev
Acknowledgements ix
Notes for Readers xiii
List of Illustrations xv
Timeline xviii
Maps of the Classical World in the First Century AD xxi
Part 3 Li v i ng w i th Bi r ds
Introduction 129
8. Captivity and Domestication 131
9. Sports and Entertainments 151
10. Relationships and Responsibilities 167
xii contents
Part 5 Th i n k i ng w i th Bi r ds
Introduction 245
14. Omens and Auguries 249
15. Magic and Metamorphosis 267
16. Signs and Symbols 285
The volume is organized by thematic parts and chapters to explore the many
different roles birds played in the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, but
these are not watertight divisions and there is a good deal of overlap and cross-
referencing between them. Bird song, for example, crops up in several chapters,
as do large topics like medicine, folklore, and omens. Readers who want to fol-
low specific trails of this kind can do so through the indexes. Each part has an
introduction to explain the progression of themes through the volume.
Brief explanatory notes on points of ornithology and historical background
appear as numbered footnotes in the text. References and guides to further
reading are collected in a section of Endnotes (pp. 389–415) and are indicated
in the text by an asterisk.
Translations of prose texts are set off in the usual way in justified lines, while
poetry is presented in shorter, unjustified lines. Many ancient authors wrote in
verse on subjects that we might nowadays expect to be treated in prose. This was
partly, no doubt, because the spread of literacy was still very limited over much
of this period and verse is usually the more memorable form of expression; but
it may also have been partly that modern distinctions between works of the
imagination and works of description were then more blurred or differently
drawn. At any rate, we find various authors choosing to present in verse long
didactic works on such themes as the farming year (Hesiod), weather signs
(Aratus), and the physical basis of the universe (Lucretius). My versions of
these are therefore more like ‘prose poems’, poetic in language to some extent but
not in formal structure, since the translations do not follow the lineation of the
originals exactly nor do they seek to replicate their metrical systems.
To avoid repetition, the 120 or so authors quoted are introduced with minimal
background information at the point of quotation, but there is a section of
Biographies of Authors Quoted (pp. 369–88) that gives fuller details of their
work and its literary context. The length of these entries is determined more by
xiv notes for readers
the relevance of the authors to the themes of this volume than by their larger
historical importance or reputation—so Aratus gets a longer entry than Plato,
for example. In the case of works whose authorship is uncertain or are now
judged to have been falsely attributed in antiquity, square brackets are used
around the name, as in [Aristotle], On Plants.
There is also a Timeline (pp. xviii–xix), listing principal authors and key
events in historical sequence to give an overall chronological framework.
In the case of bird names, it should be remembered that in many cases it is
impossible to identify the precise species intended, for the reason that some of
our current distinctions were drawn differently in the ancient world and some
not at all. I have therefore often used a generic term like ‘eagle’, ‘vulture’, ‘crow’, or
‘bird of prey’ rather than anything more specific that could be neatly matched
against a modern list. I comment on some particular difficulties in the transla-
tion of ancient bird names in the text passim and in the appendix (pp. 363–7).
The indexes should help those who may wish to explore the translations in
other ways than through the themes I have adopted as my basic structure. They
should make it easy, for example, to locate all the Homer quotations or nightin-
gale references.
LIST OF Illustrations
greek roman
kötet)
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Language: Hungarian
A TERMÉSZETTUDOMÁNY
FEJLŐDÉSÉNEK TÖRTÉNETE
MÁSODIK KÖTET
BUDAPEST
FRANKLIN-TÁRSULAT
MAGYAR IROD. INTÉZET ÉS KÖNYVNYOMDA
1912
A TERMÉSZETTUDOMÁNY
FEJLŐDÉSÉNEK TÖRTÉNETE
IRTA
WILHELM BÖLSCHE
FORDITOTTA
SCHÖPFLIN ALADÁR
MÁSODIK KÖTET
BUDAPEST
FRANKLIN-TÁRSULAT
MAGYAR IROD. INTÉZET ÉS KÖNYVNYOMDA
1912
A MODERN VILÁGKÉP ALAPVETÉSE.
II.
KEPLERTŐL NEWTONIG.
A modern világkép alapvetése.
II.
Keplertől Newtonig.