The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life ed. by Gordon Lindsay Campbell (review)

The Oxford Handbooks in Classics and Ancient History are growing like topsy. The series now has over 20 titles, ranging from The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage to The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. These historical volumes are, in fact, only a subset of a much larger project; there are now Oxford Handbooks covering practically every taste, from The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Musical Cultures to The Oxford Handbook of Rationality. Against such a background, it seems hardly unreasonable that there should be a treatment of something as apparently unfashionable and ordinary as animals.

Here we are offered 32 chapters dealing with all aspects of animals in classical antiquity. There are fewer contributors than chapters since some people have written more than one chapter. In his introduction (p. xv), Campbell says that his original plan had been to concentrate on literary and philosophical treatments of animals. The Oxford University Press readers and editors fortunately persuaded him to broaden the coverage to include the realities of, for example, hunting, sacrifice and veterinary science.

It might be said at the outset, without any criticism being intended, that most professional classicists will not be surprised by most of what they read in this book. It is the sort of volume that carefully collects together in one place the works of others rather than one that rushes into print with new discoveries. This is not to say, of course, that there are not many judgments that represent the thoughtful conclusions of the various contributors. But the overall feel of the volume is that of a compendium. Without a book like this, any classicist wanting to know about, for example, mice in ancient Greece could look at the very full entry in Der Kleine Pauly (Vol. 3, pp. 1098–1100) and come away with countless references to the primary and secondary literature on mice. The same is true of moles—mentioned in this book by MacKinnon (p. 172) but without the breadth of primary sources offered by Der Kleine Pauly (Vol. 3, p. 1091). The chief audience of a work like this, then, is perhaps not the reader already trained in classics. It is also written in English, of course, which by itself will commend it to some readers; but it offers plentiful suggestions for further reading in other languages. It is regrettably not possible (perhaps in any event unnecessary) in the scope of a review such as this to summarize the contributions of each of the 32 chapters. What follows is merely a selection of matters that caught the eye of this reviewer.

Hawtree’s chapter on animals in epic poetry carefully sorts out the many different ways in which animals penetrate and inform that poetic world. In discussing lions, however (pp. 76, 80), it is perhaps worthwhile to pause a moment to discuss how the Greeks knew about these animals. Were there any in mainland Greece at the time when the Homeric poems were taking shape or at the time when they were being recited? There is a reasonable amount of writing on this topic and it affects the question of whether the audience is hearing something familiar or something exotic known only from the poems themselves.

Howe presents a great deal of useful information about animals as a measure of wealth. Two further things might have been useful here. First, we do have some idea from inscriptions of how much some sorts of animals cost at various times and in various places. A table of prices in, say, Athens in the fifth century BC, might have been illuminating, together with an indication of what else could be bought for the same money. Second, it might be useful to have a cross-reference to Ekroth’s chapter on sacrifice where the discrepancy is noted (at p. 331) between the appearance on vases of scenes involving...