Strange animals: extremely interspecific hybridization (and anthropopoiesis) in Plutarch

Abstract

Speaking of hybridization between humans and animals, in the ancient world (and not only in the ancient world), means referring to dealing with genetic chaos logoi of the mythic tradition. But it also means constructing human-animal boundaries in a view which anthropologists call anthropopoietic. If Aristotle, in his De generatione animalium, had rationalized all the beliefs dealing with extremely interspecific crossbreeding, secularizing also the ancient concept of teras and teratodes, Plutarch, in several loci of his work (e. g. Sept. Sap. Conv. 149 C ff., Bruta anim. 990 F ff., or even Per. 6, 1-5), seems to go back to a more flexible idea of nature, where prodigious births are again permitted. This does not mean an abjuration of the natural history principles which Greek philosophical tradition has fixed. Simply these principles - which are also used as rhetorical and polemical tools in the ancient debate about animal reason - are embedded in a larger theological framework, which in some ways constructs the animal as the human ideal. What happens is that, just when the animal is used in a positive light as a reversed mirror of the human, it creates a still anthropocentric moral perspective, while blurring the boundaries between anthroposphere and zoosphere.