Anima Animalis explores the different ways poets and Presocratic philosophers perceived and understood non-human animal soul in archaic Greece. It is the first systematic study on the topic and situates itself within the rising field of animal studies in antiquity, which has witnessed a constant and significant growth in the number of scholarly publications in recent decades.
The book is remarkable for the breadth and depth of the material covered: it examines passages from the Homeric epics and hymns, the Hesiodic poems, and works by lyric poets, such as Sappho, Simonides, and Pindar. It also analyses Presocratic philosophers, including the Milesians (Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander), Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus of Ephesus, Parmenides of Elea, Empedocles of Acragas, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Diogenes of Apollonia, Democritus of Abdera, Alcmaeon of Croton, Xenophanes of Colophon, and Hippo.
The book is divided into three sections:
(i) “Actitudes hacia los animales en la Grecia arcaica” (“Attitudes towards animals in archaic Greece”). In this first section María Flores Rivas demonstrates that in archaic Greece there was no universal attitude towards animals and each animal species evoked different feelings and judgements. Thus, the author presents the potential symbolic meaning that various animals held for individual writers and within their contemporary background. This range of attitudes is indirectly evidenced by the fact that before the fifth century BC there was no specific word to describe animals collectively, as a group distinguished from other beings like humans or plants. It is only during the fifth century that the term ta zoia starts to identify the animal as a category by itself. In the Classical and Hellenistic periods, animals represent “the other,” like the barbarians: they are called aloga (“irrational”) in not being provided with logos, that is, reason, or the ability to speak a language understandable by humans. This perspective does not hold during some of the Archaic period, however. Consider the Iliad, where animals can be divine and immortal, and populate Homer’s similes where they serve to describe and explain human behaviours or characteristics of heroes. In the Odyssey and in the Hesiodic works (which the author dates later than the Iliad), a more anthropocentric worldview emerges: humans are in charge of, and superior to, animals—a divide further emphasised in the lyric poets.
In this first section, the author specifies three approaches towards animals and presents some passages through these lenses: otherness (seeing non-human animals as something different from humans), philozoism (affection for animals), and theriophily, which places animals on a superior standing.
(ii) “El alma de los animales en la épica y lírica arcaicas” (“The soul of animals in archaic epic and lyric”). In this second section, the author delves into the way archaic authors understood and conceptualized the animal soul. This section is particularly informative and digs deep into the literary and philosophical sources. It reveals that there are in fact many different terms used to describe the soul of the animals: psychē, thymos, noos, phrēn, ētor, kēr, kardia, menos, prapis, and aiōn. María Flores Rivas does a remarkable job in collecting and analysing passages attributing a soul to animals and in elucidating the nuanced meanings of these terms. She concludes that, while the ancients believed that animals, humans, and gods had something that kept them alive, there was no single term to label it and no unique understanding of it. This life-giving entity was also free of the psychological and eschatological meanings and implications that we ascribe to the soul nowadays.
(iii) “El alma de los animales en los filósofos presocráticos” (“The soul of animals in the Pre-Socratic philosophers”). In this third section, the author focusses on the Presocratics and their interpretations of the animal soul (psychē). Their philosophy promotes a “natural, holistic” approach to the kosmos: everything is derived from the archai (primordial elements) and physis (nature). The psychē is seen as the principal element that furnishes life, movement, and sensitivity to whatever there is that exists. Notably, matter too possesses psychē, as exemplified by Thales’ loadstone, which attracts things containing iron or magnetised. Thus, for Presocratics such as the Milesians, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, the lens through which we should interpret the world is not otherness, philozoism or theriophily, but rather hylozoism—a belief that matter is inherently alive. This perspective could have benefited from further elaboration, as it is only briefly addressed compared to the other themes.
These three sections are framed by a prologue by Alberto Bernabé, an introduction by María Flores Rivas addressing the topic and its methodological questions, and a summary (“Síntesis”) at the end, in which the author draws her conclusions and revisits the themes discussed in the previous chapters: animals as the other, philozoism, and continuities and changes in the human / non-human animal relationships. The book not only challenges an anthropocentric worldview but also deconstructs the boundaries between human and animals, showing how Greek attitudes to animals still offer food for thought and valuable teachings relevant today.
After the summary, at the end of the book the reader finds two extremely useful appendices: one with the Greek and Latin texts commented on or quoted in the book, with a translation in Castilian, and one with a list of the poets and philosophers examined. The appendices are followed by an extensive bibliography and indices of Greek words, of the animals, of general terms, and of fragments and passages of the corpus here examined. The appendices and the indices are praiseworthy and constitute a great tool for facilitating further reflection on the topic. The only oversight is that the index of Greek words has the lemmata only in Greek with the pages where they are to be found, whereas elsewhere in the book all Greek terms are transliterated, making the discussion more generally accessible.
I commend the author for this book, not only because she offers a rigorous, systematic approach to the interpretation of the ancient sources and the discussion of the scholarly debate over them, which specialists will find engaging, but also because she has made this material accessible to non-specialists, with its solid structure and lively translations devoid of jargon. The book is a huge endeavour and a demanding read: it covers a wide range of sources and requires the reader to engage with many philological and philosophical discussions. In every chapter the author provides us with the key points of the most important scholarly publications around the topic, explains her point of view, and presents her findings with clarity of argument and a linear organization.
As an example of María Flores Rivas’ ability to work with fragmentary texts and contribute to ongoing philosophical discussion, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to Chapter 15 (in the third section), on Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. Here the author examines the testimonies for Pythagoras, sheds light on the term metempsychosis—the re-insufflation, the process or the act of a soul “breathing again, blowing into” a different body, which establishes a parallel between the macrocosm and microcosm, humans and animals—and puts forward a reasonable interpretation of the diverging sources about Pythagoreans and vegetarianism. According to María Flores Rivas, already in antiquity Pythagoras was a legendary figure, like Orpheus, to whom different beliefs and teachings were ascribed, given the Greeks’ tendency to seek out and find a prōtos heuretēs (first discoverer). The divergences in the sources can be reconciled if we consider the evolution of the Pythagorean sect across the succeeding centuries, and suppose that it went from allowing moderate consumption of meat, especially for sacrifices or athletes, to a stricter vegetarianism. Pythagoreans were also divided into two groups, the mathēmatikoi and the akousmatikoi, with the former being the advanced learners and the latter simply ‘listeners’ or probationers, who probably adopted a more flexible lifestyle and simply restrained their meat-eating habits. The last point raised by the author is also very important (and points to a universal truth about human nature): following a doctrine or holding onto a certain belief does not imply being consistent to it at all times, and transgressions could take place, especially when they served the purpose of integrating yourself with society, like during a sacrifice.
Overall, the book is successful in proving that by the archaic period Greeks believed that animals had a soul, although different opinions coexisted: some considered it the same as, or similar to, human soul, others as different.