La simbologia dei volatilia in Plutarco

Abstract

The animal’s multifunctionality in Plutarch is irrefutable: the animal can be object of pseudo-scientific and ethological studies; it can be a symbol, a metaphor, the similitude’s object, an instrumentum used to refute the ideas and to persuade the reader, a filo-animalistic object. Interesting is the zoological repertoire’s re-use. In other words, the zoological repertoire is reused with a different meaning from its origin and is forced to take those characteristics fixed by the author. In this article I focus on the description of some birds that have their name (in the greek language) starting with the letter alpha, such as the eagle, the cormorant and the nightingale.