Introduction

Abstract

‘Have you ever read it?’ asks Socrates, and with his words Protagoras — a fifth-century BC philosopher none of whose writings survive intact — becomes an unwitting spokesman and byword in the centuries-long struggle to place non-human animals within the moral register of human beings. Buried in the corpus of Classical literature there is a diverse and enlightening narrative of man’s opinions of animals and a history of man’s interaction with the wider animal world. These works, in diverse genres from epic poetry and drama to rhetorical treatise and polemic, have been systematically mined and re-interpreted in the modern era and continue to provide historical parallels and insight into most areas of human behaviour, but until recent years only a few attempts had been made to synthesize their potential to shed light on the moral status of animals as expressed in this exceptionally well-documented period in human (or rather ‘human’) history. The best-known academic attempt to understand the nature of man’s moral relationship with non-human animals is Richard Sorabji’s 1993 Animal minds and human morals: the origins of the Western debate, and for all subsequent scholarship (including the present volume) the book remains a cornerstone in the study of ancient and modern moral understanding and the history of theorizing non-human animals’ mental faculties.

‘Protagoras says somewhere, “Of all things, man is the measure: of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not”. Have you ever read it?’

— Socrates¹

‘This is the faith shared by deep ecologists, feminists, proponents of animal rights…[t]heir common task is to bury Protagoras once and for all’.

— Tom Regan²