First, a brief overview of the two books that I wish to discuss. Julia Kindt, in The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human, sets out on an adventure in ten chapters, each dedicated to a particular animal and its relationship to humans. She explores these through the medium of storytelling, offering an in-depth analysis of the ancient sources on animal myths and their reception in the modern world. This results in many insightful points on the place of animals in both ancient and modern times. With clarity and ingenuity, she traces the wonderful ambiguity that haunts our humanity: we are animals that like to think of ourselves as different from other animals. And yet the animal in the human always returns to haunt us in all attempts to define humanity.
Huaiyu Chen’s book, titled In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions, complements Kindt’s work in a perfect way, focusing on Medieval stories about animals in Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist traditions. Through close reading and analysis of a great variety of texts, Chen demonstrates that certain animals (particularly tigers, birds, and snakes) influenced the development of these religions in surprising ways, as ideologies adapted to environmental challenges and co-opted them in the formation of religious discourses on power, politics, and the afterlife.
The medium both authors use in their work is storytelling, which directly relates to the methods I used in my book on the wolf in Roman religion and mythology, titled Wolves of Rome: The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives. Kindt deploys a wide range of theories to stories that span across the centuries: in each chapter she begins with an ancient tale and ends with its reception in the modern world. The result is an exploration that stretches from Homer and Hesiod to Kafka and Picasso, a rich tapestry of myths and beings that have fascinated generations and defined what it means to be human and to be animal.
It would be impossible to survey all the themes that are analysed in both these rich works. Thus I will turn to several select topics that resonate with my own work.
Kindt uses ten wisely chosen examples to show that attempts to define human exceptionalism always return to the point of human animality, indicating that the borders between us and our animal kin are more porous and fluid than we are used to thinking. For example, the Sphynx, a curious, hybrid creature teaches Oedipus a lesson in different life stages of the human life but also a more important lesson about the limits of knowing oneself. In another chapter, Achilles’ horse speaks to the hero of his fate (to fight and die at Troy) and the need to recognize one’s place in the world and human limits in the face of the divine. Similarly, in my work I have tried to show that Romans recurrently defined themselves in relation to the wolf, even when the negative connotations of the animal were used by their enemies against them.
The warrior connotations of the wolf in Roman imagination chime with Kindt’s analysis of animals in war. In her chapter on the Trojan horse she concludes (p. 133): “Warfare, then, is an area of life in which humans, at least on occasion, take on animal traits, and in which some animals turn out to be surprisingly human inside.” Romans used the mythology of wolves and horses in a similar way to bolster their warrior identity. Hence we must abandon the stereotype of the wolf as the villain of fairy-tale and reconsider its rightful place in Roman religion as well as acknowledge the wolf’s wider positive role in nomadic and semi-nomadic societies from the First Peoples of Northern America (e.g. Ojibwe) to Mongolian genealogies.
My study of Roman mythology comes closest to Kindt’s in her discussion of rites of passage that construe masculinity as a form of predation in Chapter 6. As Kindt shows, Homeric warriors were likened to lions and their raging prowess was construed in terms of animal predation in hunting. I argue that wolves were central to the Roman festival of the Lupercalia because the naked priests of this cult (the Luperci) were originally a warrior brotherhood in the service of the wild god Faunus. They identified with wolves in rites of passage that brought their animality to the fore in the same way that Homeric heroes displayed their wild nature in warfare.
It is very interesting to notice similar ambiguities surrounding tigers, the main predators in China. As Chen shows (p. 73), in the ancient period, King Wu of the Zhou dynasty instituted tiger warriors as his elite military guards who wore robes with patterns of tiger skin. In Confucian ideology, officials dispatched by the central government to handle rebellious locals were sometimes literally called “tigers”, symbolizing the teeth and claws of the emperor in the region. On the other hand, tigers also gradually came to be perceived as the equivalent of local groups opposing the civilizing power of the central imperial state, whose task it was to tame and control them. Similarly, Buddhist monks boasted of the ability to tame and even convert tigers, demonstrating their skills in controlling both the wilderness and wild urges. As Chen observes, this can be compared to Christian saints such as Francis of Assisi taming a wolf or Saint Jerome receiving the assistance of a lion who becomes his servant.
In her conclusion, Kindt singles out the divine as another theme that defines the human (alongside the animal) in the ancient world. This is a point she has previously developed in her edited volume Animals in Ancient Greek Religion (2020) where a number of contributors have shown that Greek deities were conceived as partly animal. A similar conclusion emerges from Chen’s discussion of the lion representing the power of Indra and Śiva but also the might and wisdom of the Buddha, who was incarnated as a lion in some of his previous lives (whereas the tiger plays this role in Medieval China). In Chapter 6, he also notes that Chinese culture heroes or sages had animal body parts. This sort of hybridity is also a feature of Roman gods such as Faunus, the wild god of animals, as I argued in Chapter 6 of my Wolves of Rome. In all these cultures, animals are not simply sacrificial offerings to be used as bargaining chips in human relations with divinity, they are a vehicle towards the divine and a substantial part of divine identity itself.
One of Kindt’s main points is that we should not underestimate anthropomorphism in ancient myths by misreading it as a variation of anthropocentrism. Anthropomorphism in ancient myths often seems to be an attempt to relate the animal and the human in sympathetic ways based on common features between the two. I have argued for the same sort of understanding of animal natures in Vedic and Roman religion by using Philippe Descola’s theory of analogist systems, in which specific beings in the cosmos are related based on shared traits. For example, in one Vedic ritual this formula is used to liken the human king with wild animals (Śatapatha Brahmana 12.7.3.20):
There are wolf hairs; thus he gains the strength and speed of wild beasts. There are tiger hairs; thus he gains the rage and sovereignty of wild beasts. There are lion hairs; thus he gains the might and lordship of wild beasts.
In the case of wolves and young men, the common element of predation and group cohesion is used to elicit the sort of masculinity that was desirable in ancient youthbands. Similarly, Chen explores analogist thinking in Chapters 2 and 3 of his book, tracing it from Vedic Hinduism to Chinese “correlative thinking” in Confucian ideology, in which aggressive tigers would be neutralized or would simply swim away only if the governors or administrators of the region are just and benevolent. The cross-cultural analogies between human and non-human actors indicates that people across different times and places had similar tendencies in correlating the human microcosm with the larger macrocosm, confirming Descola’s hypothesis. It seems that in Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese ideologies, elite identities were shaped in relation to several predators: lions, tigers, and wolves, depending on which animals were prevalent in the different environments. Thus, in India and Greece, lions were the primary animals of prestige for elite men, while in China it was the tiger, the king of the forest in east Asia. However, Chen’s Chapter 4 and 5 sounds several notes of caution: animals were considered inferior to humans in both Buddhist and Daoist system, and killing tigers and snakes was sometimes justified as an act of conquest of wild nature. It would be delusional to romanticize Asian religions as always wiser and more progressive than European Christianity.
Finally, I was glad to see that Huaiyu Chen’s epilogue stresses the need to study the role of animals in religion more broadly, by including a variety of religious traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Daoism and Confucianism. This is a salutary call to counter the provincialism of narrow focus in individual fields (Classics often falls in this trap) by expanding the scope of study beyond any single culture. As I have argued in my book, comparing and contrasting different attitudes across cultures is the best way to study specificities and discover idiosyncrasies (and not blur the boundaries of individual cultures, as critics of comparativism often erroneously say). Similarly, in her conclusion Kindt calls for a form of decolonisation that should include a wider diversity of scholars rewriting the history of the ancient world, a history that should include not only Other humans but also Other non-human animals. The three books in this essay are thus best read in dialogue, enabling the reader to explore the same themes and topics in different cultures and time periods, from China to Rome, and from the ancient to the modern.
