Julia Kindt begins her captivating study of our longstanding relationship with animals by posing two questions: “What makes us human? What, if anything, sets us apart from all other creatures?” (xi). This succinctly summarizes what she proceeds to explore in a book whose enthusiastic blurbs from distinguished scholars underscore the extensive research, elegant writing and broad range of topics and approaches that lie within. When beginning to read the book, little did I anticipate the fantastic journey upon which I was about to embark, a metaphor Kindt employs in her Conclusion: “the journey has taken us to many fascinating places … I hope you enjoyed the ride” (273).
Ten chapters follow a clearly articulated organizational Introduction that spells out the rationale of the book’s topic. Each chapter features creatures whose peculiarities comment on human nature by way of parallel or difference: the Sphinx, Xanthus (Achilles’ horse), the Lion of Androclus, the Cyclops, the Trojan Horse, the “Trojan” boar (a dish served at Trimalchio’s banquet), bees as metaphors for political systems, the Socratic gadfly, the Minotaur, and, new to me, the shearwaters of Diomedea. Each of the mammalians, insects and birds included in the stories and art discussed herein provides insight into who we are as human beings by way of highly imaginative stories and their reception that observe ourselves in the bodies and minds of non-humans and vice versa. Anthropomorphism, Kindt argues, has the potential to create “real sympathies, real communalities between the human and the non-human” (279).
More importantly, Kindt pushes the boundaries of her narrative considerably further than this: Western philosophy and thinking in general have perdured as logocentric, androcentric and anthropocentric. Our millennia-old entanglement with animals has the potential to challenge these long-held prejudices, including that humans are superior to all other beings and that white males rank highest in human taxonomy. Classics, Kindt posits, has an opportunity to debunk Western elitism by dissolving the lines between East-West, civilized-primitive, male-female and now human-animal; to include the voices of the disenfranchised in the ancient world; and to make sure that there emerges “a diverse cast of scholars who gets to (re-)write the history of the ancient world today” (281). What started as a series of investigations into a critique of a “man-only topos” morphed into a powerful argument for “decolonizing the Classics.”
Kindt begins with the Sphinx in Chapter 1. This hybrid creature, both liminal and female, asks Oedipus a question regarding his and all human nature: what sort of being are we? The answer calls attention to the fact that at one point in our lives we did not walk upright, a connection with our animal origins and an idea later famously developed by Darwin, as duly noted; no wonder his conclusions were so vehemently rejected by our anthropocentric ancestors. Of course, things did not go well for Oedipus, despite his reliance on logic, which, as Kindt rightly points out, offers an implicit critique of the logocentrism endorsed by most philosophers, ancient and modern. As elsewhere, Kindt moves from antiquity to modernity and in this case naturally turns to Freud, who found in Oedipus’ self-discovery “the revelatory processes of psychoanalysis” (28). Freud, we learn, hung a print of Oedipus and the Sphinx by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in one of his consulting rooms. In it Oedipus stares at a highly feminized version of the creature, focusing directly at, almost longingly on, her breasts. Kindt notes: “Throughout his oeuvre, the analytic gaze is imagined as a distinctly male gaze focused on the unconscious imagined as female, seductive, and riddling” (30). The dangerous Sphinx resided outside of the city, and, like all women in antiquity (and all too many in modern times), was excluded from the space reserved for men’s activities. For Freud, she represented male anxiety over female sexuality and underscored Freud’s need for male primacy (androcentrism). The chapter offers an illustrative example of how Kindt teases out important implications of the ancient stories per se and in their reception.
I’ll limit my discussion to three more chapters in which Kindt invites us to rethink our understanding of mythological figures, such as Achilles’ talking horse, Xanthus, the subject of Chapter 2. As noted at the outset of the chapter, “the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism” (33). Xanthus, an instance of animal “uplifting” (37), in reminding Achilles of his impending doom also reminds us that fate cannot be controlled by any intervention on our part. This occurs at the moment when Achilles is about to descend toward the bestial slaughter of so many, totally obliterating the distance between man and animal. The chapter also includes Plutarch’s treatise Beasts are Rational. In it, Odysseus speaks with a pig, Gryllus, on Circe’s island. The pig contends that animals are actually more virtuous than humans, being more instinctive in their fighting and never assuming the deceptive practices of a conniving Odysseus. Moreover, animals have more temperance, practical wisdom and moderation in eating. Why then would any animal want to become human, Gryllus wonders? So much for human exceptionalism!
Chapter 4 focuses on Polyphemus and Cyclopian society. Even though they are hominoids, despite having only one eye, Cyclopes eat humans, have no religion, do not offer blood sacrifice and do not eat bread (lacking agriculture, a technology characteristic of civilized people). Living far from Greece, they represent the barbaric Other, the “natives” unable to manage alcohol consumption. According to Kindt, “his (Polyphemus’) figure anticipates the stereotypes that parts of the later Western ethnographic tradition projected onto other peoples” (98). Thus this Homeric episode constitutes a telling instance of racism, in which Odysseus’ victory represents the superiority of logos over lower intellect barbarity. Such thinking finds parallels in the aforementioned tradition in which we encounter the stereotypical “savage,” as found in Darwin’s depiction of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego: “Their skill, like the instinct of animals, is not improved by experience” (103; the quotation on p. 104 is equally horrific). Ergo: the superiority of Western logocentrism. Kindt concludes, and powerfully so, that classical studies can call upon this Homeric episode as a way to “rethink, decenter, and de-normalize our notions of ‘the human’” and “make visible the hidden symbolic transactions on which these notions are based” (108).
In Chapter 9, Kindt turns her attention to the Minotaur, touching briefly on other instances of hybridity (centaurs, satyrs and Pan). The Minotaur in particular “manifests the monstrous consequences of human transgression” (209). The nature of his conception and birth raises the concept (long before Darwin) that humans are a species of animal; “the world is more complex than the categories we have created to describe, contain, and control it” (215). As Kindt notes, the imaginative possibility of such unusual hybridity follows naturally from the practice of cross-breeding animals (e.g., jackass and mare) and plants (grafting). In the case of the origin of the mule, “(i)ts breeding is a violent and transgressive act which first happened as an extraordinary occurrence, an aberration of nature, later copied by humans who then applied it to their own advantage” (218); in short, it represents a kind of manufactured rape or adultery reflecting an underlying hybris. Moreover, while bulls are typically sacrificed and consumed, this half-man-half-bull consumes humans, a violence that replicates the manner of his conception. The chapter concludes with a survey of an autobiographical series of disturbing etchings that Picasso made of himself as Minotaur. Kindt observes that the mythological figure in these works “inhabits a deeper ground in which art-making and love-making converge. And again, this convergence points us back to the themes we found in ancient myth: boundaries, transgression – and ultimately destruction” (233) such that “our humanity is only ever a thin veneer on a deeper animality that may break through at any time” (242).
The Trojan Horse and Other Stories. Ten Ancient Creatures that Make us Human challenges us to reexamine how we engage Classical antiquity and modern prejudices. Kindt writes lucidly and with a splendid verve that erupts in the occasional, lively and well-timed pun. The narrative is also richly illustrated with numerous images. I enjoyed reading and learning from this book and recommend it with enthusiasm. And yes, I enjoyed the ride!