Should Plutarch be cancelled? Of the views and values offered across the Plutarchan corpus, some are likely to feel uncomfortable and outright disagreeable today (this is no place for giving ammo, of course). But there is also material in Plutarch that ought to accommodate the sensitivities of morally awake, forward-thinking readers in the twenty-first century. N.'s book profiles Plutarch as a spokesman for the mental faculties of non-human animals and for animal dignity more generally, which makes Plutarch a noteworthy forerunner of the modern arguments in favour of animal intelligence and animal rights. The volume contains translations of three Plutarchan works that deal with animals: the dialogues Whether Land or Sea Animals Have More Intelligence and Whether Beasts are Rational (hereafter, Cleverness and Gryllus), and the two-part declamation On Eating Meat (hereafter, Eating). Each translation is sandwiched between an introductory essay and a commentary organised as endnotes.
In terms of translation N. inevitably competes against W.C. Helmbold's richly annotated translation of the same texts in volume 12 of the Loeb edition of Plutarch's Moralia (1957). N. often deserves credit for tackling the nuances of the Greek text with subtlety and precision. Thus, ‘besouled’ strikes me as a very effective word choice for ἔμψυχος in Cleverness at 960C–D (rather than sticking to ‘besouled’, N. opts for ‘living’ and ‘creature’ at, respectively, 962C and Eating 997D); ‘sense of the divine’ for θειότης is an improvement on Helmbold's ‘divine inspiration’ (Cleverness 975A). Another merit of N.'s translation is the tendency to follow manuscript readings (based on C. Hubert's 1959 Teubner text) instead of editorial conjectures; one might only wish that, when this is the case (Cleverness 964C, 977A, 981B; Gryllus 987F; Eating 997C, 999A), N. would flag up his resistance to emendations more forcefully as well as more systematically in the comments. Yet N.'s loyalty to the transmitted Plutarchan text is not absolute either. On several occasions, a significant word or even a short phrase is left out from the translation: πολυπρόσωπον (Cleverness 973E), ἀντὶ τῶν σφαγέντων (Cleverness 972C), πολλῶν … ἀνθρώπων (Eating 995D). At Cleverness 982E I assume that ‘with pleasure’ is meant as an intentional departure – again, without an explicitly stated rationale – from ἀδεῶς in the Teubner text, probably because of Plutarch's description of frogs in Natural Questions 912C. Sometimes N. takes the edge off the metaphors contained within Plutarch's Greek wording: ‘[I] shall cite’ at Cleverness 971B fails to give justice to μάρτυρι χρήσομαι (which looks forward to the analogy at 975C), and the image of warfare risks being lost when ἐκεχειρία is translated as ‘day of rest’ (in inverted commas) at Cleverness 975D. In fact, it is oddly reassuring when N. chooses to duplicate Helmbold's translation (e.g. Gryllus 987B ‘spiritual soil’, 991D ‘your so-called civilized and hospitable tables’); in a couple of passages N.'s drive for greater literalness slides into obscurity – consider Eating 999A or the change from ‘the mares’ to ‘the females’ at Cleverness 977A. N.'s decision to turn the long rhetorical question at Eating 998C into a statement is interesting and more consequential than it may seem at first.
The interpretative substance of the book resides in the introductory essays and commentaries. As someone who has published, to date, two monographs, numerous articles and chapters, and a sourcebook on the ancient and especially Plutarch's attitude(s) towards animals, N. is very much on his home turf here. Each of the translated texts receives a compact discussion qua literary work, and the ideas, references and anecdotes therein are duly contextualised. N.'s Plutarch is an erudite and sympathetic, at times ironic, supporter of the pro-animal cause. Throughout the volume (e.g. pp. 1, 9–13, 60–1, 68, 70–1, 132–4, 136–7, 145–6, 148) Plutarch's appreciative construal of animal psychology and his loathing of cruelty against animals are matched with similar views in the modern Anglophone debate from the 1980s onwards. There is also considerable effort to situate Plutarch in the Greek reflection about animals; particularly informative and useful is the outline of the Stoics’ position, which comes under sustained attack in Cleverness (pp. 4–7, 57–9, 61–2, 66–7, 81 etc.). Having said that, it is clear that N. is consolidating on previous scholarship (not least, by N. himself) for the benefit of readers who do not necessarily have in-depth expertise in antiquity. Such readers certainly stand to learn a great deal from this book, which draws discerningly on, inter alia, several high-calibre commented editions of the relevant Plutarchan texts. To the more advanced specialist, however, both the data and the discursive exegesis are going to be largely familiar and predictable. Quite apart from a fair amount of basic information (e.g. p. 78 n. 166, p. 89 n. 317), many commentary entries simply spell out the references to loci paralleli. In fact, N. is rather often delivering a more reader-friendly, so to speak, version of Helmbold's footnotes (see Cleverness: nn. 38–9, 51–2, 98, 108, 110–11, 127, 133, 139, 149, 182–3, 196, 212, 215, 223, 233; Gryllus: nn. 15, 30–1, 36, 41, 45, 47–9, 61; Eating: p. 162 n. 13), although other ancient evidence is brought into play too (e.g. Cleverness: nn. 54, 161, 192–4). Cross-references to Plutarch's writings are plenty, but the Lives are somewhat underused. Moreover, it appears that N. is wary of feeding readers references to the (arguably) more tangential and esoteric ancient sources: while Aristotle, Pliny and Aelian are cited generously, authors such as Antigonus of Carystus, Philostratus or Pollux are kept out, and the mentions of Oppian can be counted on the fingers of one hand. At Cleverness 960C N. passes over the complex question of phantasia (‘the representational element’, τὸ … φανταστικόν) vs rationality.
All this is understandable, given the book's agenda and target readership. But there are more fundamental problems to how N. frames Plutarch as a thinker and writer. When N. points out the affinities between Plutarch's attitude to animals and the current pro-animal discourse, he stops short of mapping out the longer-term theoretical currents that connect the latter to the former. It is fascinating, for sure, that the language in Plutarch ‘anticipates the motto of the animal rights organisation PETA’ (p. 70 n. 81), but what does this actually prove – is it just a lucky (for whom?) coincidence or something more than that? At the end of the day N. fails to meaningfully contextualise Plutarch's intellectual personality. The piecemeal observations (p. 2 philosophical lecturer; p. 14 n. 3 biographer fond of sunkrisis; p. 101 ‘ardent student of religions’) are plainly correct, but there is also the disturbingly simplistic summary (p. 146 n. 15) of E. Bowie's overview of poetic citations in Plutarch. The Roman Empire as a cultural and ideological factor is given little attention. Crucially, the role of Plato on Plutarch's philosophical and intertextual horizon is not adequately addressed by N.; the allusion to the Symposium at Cleverness 975C is well spotted (p. 83 n. 227), yet the phrase ‘under the guidance of Plato’ (Cleverness 964D) and the all-important Plutarchan simile of mixing wine with water (at Gryllus 988D–E) are not discussed at all. It is, indeed, in Gryllus, where the trade-off between the humorous thrust and philosophical allegiance cannot be taken for granted, that fuller appreciation of Plutarch's Platonism is called for; N. does not pursue Gryllus’ indebtedness to the Platonic myths of metempsychosis (which would have explained the non-Homeric asses, at 986B). In the commentary on Cleverness the dialogical nature of the text is both acknowledged (p. 84 n. 231) and overlooked (p. 76 n. 142: ‘It is surprising …’).
Typos are pleasingly few. Quotations from German, French and Italian are not translated; N.'s bibliography, while looking deceptively compact, is rich and multilingual, although the absence of some major recent studies (e.g. J.-F. Lhermitte, L'animal vertueux dans la philosophie antique à l’époque imperiale [2015]; T. Korhonen and E. Ruonakoski, Human and Animal in Ancient Greece: Empathy and Encounter in Classical Literature [2017]; P. Li Causi, Gli animali nel mondo antico [2018]) is noticeable. The index is far from exhaustive.
