Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words by Jeremy Mynott (review)

With his Birds in the Ancient World, Jeremy Mynott joins the likes of Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, John Pollard, and W. Geoffrey Arnott, all British scholars whose love of classics and passion for birding produced important contributions to classical ornithology.¹ While Thompson’s and Arnott’s are essentially reference works, Pollard’s is closest to Mynott’s, in that both are arranged thematically. But four decades have passed since Pollard, allowing Mynott to take advantage of the fairly large body of ornithological scholarship since then. He also includes a wide selection of translations from the ancient sources (over 120 classical authors, all newly translated) and supplies 95 colour illustrations, making this a handy and handsome volume for the classically and ornithologically minded reader (kudos to Oxford University Press on the design and overall layout of the book). It also serves as a fine companion to his earlier Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience,² a more discursive volume, covering a broader geographic and temporal range, but one that asks similar questions about how the avian world impinges upon the human world and vice versa.

Seeing himself as a “cultural and ornithological guide,” Mynott uses “birds as a prism” (vi) to explore their manifold cultural refractions. To this end he divides the book into six sections with 20 chapters: 1. Birds in the Natural World; 2. Birds as a Resource; 3. Living with Birds; 4. Invention and Discovery; 5. Thinking with Birds; 6. Birds as Intermediaries. Given the volume’s scope, he conveniently prefaces each part with an introduction setting out the themes explored within each chapter; supplies a timeline and maps and two types of notes (numbered footnotes on ornithological and historical matters, and references to further reading marked by asterisks); includes brief biographies of classical authors; and provides two indexes, one general and one specific for the various birds referred to. This last raises the perennial problem of the precise identification of each species (see, e.g., 29–30, 97–98, 168–172, 352). Given that modern taxonomy does not always align with ancient, that the distribution of species may have significantly altered, and that our ancient sources—just like some of our modern ones— may not have bothered to distinguish various subspecies from one another, he includes an appendix (363–367) of bird lists derived from Aesop and Aristophanes, as well as from their visual representations in Pompeii. Despite these detailed lists, Mynott notes that their seeming precision is belied by the endemic uncertainties of any such cross-cultural comparison: “In the Aristophanes case we may often understand the connotations of the terms employed (the description) but not their precise denotation (the species they refer to); in the Pompeii case it is the reverse, we can see exactly which species is being depicted but we don’t know whether the artist or viewer was making the same discriminations as we do” (367). It is precisely this kind of nuanced analysis that makes Mynott’s work more than just a repository of interesting bird lore. And despite the volume’s broad remit, a recurrent theme is the significance of birds within the lives of the ancients, not only in terms of their impact on daily life, whether heard twittering in trees or seen soaring high above, but also in terms of their impression upon the imagination, whether understood as symbols in myth or as signs in augury. As Mynott points out, the Greek word ornis can mean both “bird” and “omen,” which explains why they were “literally ‘significant’” (89).

Although any volume boasting such a title would appear to be all- encompassing, there are the inevitable gaps. But these are few, and though most likely to be overlooked by the majority of his readers, it would be a disservice not to attempt to fill some of them in. Let the following two remarks, then, be taken as supplements to, rather than as critiques of...