How do non-human animals ‘speak’ to us? What is Tierrede? Most of the communication between humans is non-verbal, so that articulate speech is only a small part of our interaction. Those of us living in close, everyday contact with our mammal companion animals would gladly agree with the notion of ‘the eloquence of animal muteness’ (the phrase of A. McDonald paraphrasing Derrida, p. 498 n. 78 in this volume). Non-human animals speak with their cries, sounds and bodies; they interpret us via our sounds and body language. Without having a common articulate language different species could thus have some kind of reciprocity in their communication. This volume concentrates on non-humans speaking human language(s). In ancient literature there are obviously more cases in which fictive animals speak human language than recorded examples of intraspecies communication in life, such as that between Porphyry and his partridge: according to Porphyry, the bird communicated by making sounds back in response to Porphyry's sounds (cf. K.F. Kitchell Jr, the author of the concise but useful Animals in the Ancient World from A–Z, p. 459 in this volume).
Based mostly on the papers given at the conference ‘“Mein Hahn spricht wie ein Mensch!” Tierrede in antiker Literatur’ at the University of Potsdam in 2018, the volume contains 21 articles – with a praiseworthy number of cross-references – of which eight, including the introduction, are in German. Every contribution begins with an abstract. The table of contents is in German, and the articles are divided into four sections. After the ‘Einführung’ (Part 1) by the editor Schmalzgruber, Part 2, ‘Sprechende Tiere in der griechisch-römischen Antike’, is divided into three subsections: ‘Tierrede als literarisches Mittel’ (fourteen papers), ‘Tierrede als übernatürliches Phänomen’ (two papers) and ‘Imitation menschlicher Rede durch reale Tiere’ (the paper by Kitchell Jr). Part 3, ‘Sprechende Tiere in anderen Kulturen des Altertums’, discusses speaking animals in Egyptian, Jewish and Hindu traditions (by McDonald, D. Vorpahl and D. Hodgkinson respectively), providing valuable background and comparative materials, which bear their specific symbolic meanings on animals in their context. Along with examples from the rabbinical tradition, Vorpahl adduces two cases from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: the speaking serpent in the Garden of Eden and the donkey of Balaam. Hodgkinson compares Jaṭāyus, the speaking king of vultures who guided Rāma (in Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa), with Nestor and Phoenix in the Iliad, noting the ‘outsider’ character of the advising figure of a hero. Part 4, ‘Jenseits der griechisch-römischen Antike’, comprises T. Gärtner's paper on Anthropomyomachia, an animal epyllion from the nineteenth century written in archaising Greek (Neu-Altgriechisch or so-called Humanist Greek).
The articles of Part 2 concentrating on Graeco-Roman Antiquity are arranged in convenient chronological order, beginning with Archilochus’ fable on the fox and eagle (by I. Silva) and ending with the great late antique animal epics by Oppian and pseudo-Oppian (M. Cariou) and Christian texts, Augustine (S. Feddern) as well as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the Physiologus (J.E. Spittler). In addition to the fact that many of the writers are well-known experts in their areas, the wide range of material is the major strength of this part and the whole volume. Aesopian animals or animals in fables is the material group that first comes to mind. They are the subject of five articles: besides Silva, the writers include U. Gärtner (Phaedrus), S. Pertsinidis (Babrius), Schmalzgruber (Avianus) and Feddern (fables interpreted as allegory in verbis by Augustine). Furthermore, Egyptian fables are mentioned by McDonald.
The second obvious source of material for speaking animals in ancient literature is comedy and satire. Both experts of Attic comedy, B. Pütz and K.S. Rothwell Jr, concentrate on Aristophanes, the latter (the writer of a monograph on the subject) on animal choruses. However, the conceptual background of animals used as comical characters – why it is so universal to laugh at anthropomorphised animals – is not clearly put forth. Moreover, the three famous individual speaking animals with satirical and/or comical elements, Rooster in Lucian's Gallus (the paper by É. Marquis), Plutarch's Gryllus (A. Pabst) and Apuleius’ Lucius (N.W. Slater) are, to be specific, humans transformed into animal form and not non-human animal characters per se.
Animals also speak in animal epics/epyllions of which there is the late example composed by Eduard Eyth. His Anthropomyomachia (1840) is carefully edited by T. Gärtner with apt references to Homer and some late antique epics. There could have been a short presentation of this genre in antiquity (known titles, fragments – even a papyrus fragment – are extant) and beyond: the Byzantine Katomyomachia is a possible political allegory like Anthropomyomachia. Compared to Batrachomyomachia, both these later epics seem not to enjoy depicting mice as embodied beings, but largely as humans dressed in mice bodies.
Animal characters in comedies and animal epics as well as in many fables are ‘I’-speakers, able to deliver their (imagined) first-person perspective on animal life. The little-studied Oppianic animal epics Halieutica and Cynegetica contain many epic similes including animals, for instance, pleading for their lives in the first person. Staying inside the genre of didactic poetry, Cariou mentions the Hawk and Nightingale told by Hesiod (Op. 207–11), but not other fables as models for these kinds of prosopopoeiae (for some reason she does not refer to the work on these epics by A.N. Bartley [2003]). Animals sometimes speak in the first person in funerary epigrams – literary or non-literary, mocking and genuine, also in inscriptions. In this volume, they are discussed by three writers: N. Mindt, S. La Barbera (Culex) and S. Fischer (Testamentum porcelli). Mindt displays a comprehensive chart of longer direct speech by animals in Greek and Roman epicedia (pp. 210–11) and also lists the cases in the Anthologia Graeca. The short presentations of the extraordinary pig epitaph of Edessa by La Barbera and Fischer could have included references to Greek scholars who first published and discussed it during the 1970s. Interestingly, Fischer combines both the pig epitaph and the late antique ‘Pig's testament’ with the Saturnalia, La Barbera compares the pseudo-Virgilian Culex with Lycophron's Alexandra; M. Vespa, discussing ‘talking animals’ as a supernatural phenomenon, also chooses an unexpected source, namely Pseudo-Plutarch's De fluviis, interpreting the three cases of talking animals as human voices inside animal bodies dictated by gods. In this connection, Vespa uses the innovative term ‘distributed agency’ devised by Peter Taylor (2003).
The detailed presentation of this highly recommendable book is beyond the scope of this review. Theoretical points of view vary from classical philology to literary studies – Silva bringing the interesting viewpoint of cognitive science to anthropomorphising animals. Anthropomorphism as such does not arouse much theoretical interest among the contributors (as it has among the ecocritics; see, for instance, G. Garrard [2012]). Many (U. Gärtner, Schmalzgruber, Feddern, Putz, Mindt, Slater, Cariou) point to R. Borgards's ideas, especially his article ‘Tiere in der Literatur’ (2012), making the basic zoopoetical division into diegetic and non-diegetic animals in literature, that is, animals as part of the fictive or non-fictive and/or in a semantic function, used, for example, as metaphor. Mindt especially points out that these functions could be mixed; animals could, at the same time, be ‘Objekte der literarischen Rede’ and ‘Mittel der literarischen Rede’ (p. 245).
Another strength of this book, besides the variety of its content, is its strong analyses of the prevailing material from different viewpoints by each writer in order to show why the concept of the ‘talking animal’ is so fruitful as a literary stratagem. There are many reasons to make non-human animals speak human language: it can indicate gentle irony (Marquis, p. 369), heighten pathos (Cariou, p. 327), function as an allegory (see especially Feddern) or as a mere facade and mouthpiece (Spittler, p. 443). Although we are also ready to see animal characters as mere functions, fables may be a means to ponder deep, permanently unsolved questions of life, like hierarchies, violence and dominance.
With their rich tradition of talking animals in fables and other fictive diegetic material, the view that animals have logos as some kind of ratio, but not logos as speech, was not so uncommon among the Greeks and Romans: that animals have the nature of thought as logos endiathetikos, as internalised speech (cf. Slater, p. 286), but not the organs for speech. There are some myths or fables on the effortlessness of intraspecies communication or that animals had once possessed and then lost their ability to speak human language (cf. pp. 87, 470). Pabst interprets logos in the title of Plutarch's Peri tou ta aloga logou chresthai (the Gryllus-dialogue) as ‘speech’ rather than ratio, so that the treatise is a thought experiment along the lines of ‘what if animals could speak’ (pp. 338–41). However, the Nachleben (see Giovanni Battista di Gellin's Circe [1549] and La Fontaine's fable Nr. XII.1 [1690]) points to the more common interpretation of the dialogue, namely, that the topic is which life is better, human or non-human life, and that preferring the latter due to animals’ ‘natural' morality serves as a cultural critique for Plutarch.
Schmalzgruber most clearly brings forward the question of what the literary device ‘talking animals’ might tell us about human–animal relationships or attitudes to animals. By comparing Avianus’ animals to the much livelier and ‘realistically’ presented animals in Babrius, she notes that the animals’ speech in Avianus, imbued with rhetorical stylisation, does not diminish the boundary between humans and non-humans – the possibility of (articulate) communication for non-human animals, intraspecies communication, is not used to its full potential in these texts. Why is this so? The basic reason is surely the speciesism – that we are (naturally) mostly interested in and focused on us humans – of which the ancients were perhaps less aware than we are. Micyllus’ first question after the shock of his rooster suddenly speaking human language (in Lucian's Gallus) is what it is like to be an animal (who is, in fact, Pythagoras, having reincarnated in many animals’ bodies). The lives of animals are not the point of the dialogue – they are not the genuine interest of Lucian or his audience despite their culture's rich tradition of metamorphoses.
The book includes a useful and carefully compiled index locorum (anglicised names for ancient authors) and an index animalium in German, providing reasons to actively learn some not so familiar animal names, like vulture, in German (‘Geier’). The index locorum makes it possible to find, for instance, the reference to Callimachus’ fox (fr. 152A, on p. 64 by U. Gärtner), the Perry number for the fable referred in the Anthropomyomachia (Perry 155) and the two brief discussions on Xanthus (by Vespa and Hodgkinson), the first speaking animal in Greek literature (Hom. Il. 19.404–18), with whom Schmalzgruber begins her ‘Einführung’.
