This chapter explores the range of philosophical, literary, and religious ideas about the rational-discursive faculty and species identity that medieval audiences inherited from ancient Greece and the Hellenizing poetry of ancient Rome. It argues that this inheritance was profoundly ambivalent. In both the medieval Ovide moralisé and Plato’s Timaeus, any cognitive differences between species become relativized by the assertion that souls continually transmigrate from one body to another; additionally, under certain circumstances, it seems as though the rational-discursive faculty can be located beyond the limits of the human being. Aristotle advanced a comparatively hardline position: Humans are the only rational animals (although certain creatures like parrots raise potential difficulties). On the level of literary fantasy, the “Philomena” tale of the Ovide moralisé and the Old Occitan Novas del papagay probed at the limits of the same questions investigated by ancient authorities and their medieval translators, the ambivalent details of their diction condensing some of the thorniest dilemmas hidden at the intersection of speech and species.