Good to Think: Wolves and Wolf-Men in the Graeco-Roman World

Abstract

It is a commonplace that metaphors tend to cluster around core themes — a tendency rather grandly termed the ‘systematicity of metaphor’.1 We might well extend the point to other, still more routinised forms of linguistic expression: such as proverbs, sayings and catchphrases. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, where, depending on period, between 85 percent and 95 percent of the entire population lived on the land, such tendencies are particularly observable in relation to animals, both wild and domestic. A standard modern Graeco-Roman Bestiary, careful but by no means complete, contains entries for 181 mammalian species, Mediterranean and exotic, from the common-or-garden to the virtually mythical.2 Moreover, at any rate in Greek perspective, animals, above all mammals, were just part of a much broader continuum of animate beings, whose main constituents are gods, demi-gods and heroes, nymphs, mythical creatures such as centaurs and Sirens, humans (Greeks and others), beasts — and in some dispositifs, such as ‘magic’, even plants and stones, though they were otherwise not considered animate in the required sense.3 In other words, the classification system encompassed, not merely what we would call natural species, but also super- and para-natural entities of different degrees, so that quite as much interest focused on establishing the external relations of the different groups as on the definitions of individual species.4 Myths, ‘folk wisdom’ and catch-phrases are some of the media through which relations between the groups were represented. Ancient stories about transformation and metamorphosis derive their cultural legitimacy from this conception of a densely-populated continuum of animate beings.